Every day, clinicians in ICUs make high-stakes decisions about medical treatments that keep their patients alive. Variables like unusual immune responses can make that job more complicated. But now, a project led by the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine aims to find out if digital twins can help.
The university has been awarded up to $38 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The school said in a press release that the award is the largest in its history.
The Reprogramming Severe Critical Illness Using Extensible Digital Twins project, or ReSCUED, will be led by Dr. Gary An, a trauma surgeon and professor at the University of Vermont.
A digital twin is a computational model of a system or object that uses continuous data to stay in sync with its real-world counterpart, offering insight into how the real thing might react to different conditions and scenarios.
Even with today’s medical advances, the complexities of immune system dysfunction can still pose major challenges. An mentioned sepsis, a potentially-deadly condition in which the immune system over-reacts to an infection, as an example.
“Sepsis is a huge health care problem, and one that will only get bigger as the population gets older and we get better at keeping people alive,” An said in a statement. Even in modern ICUs, sometimes people’s bodies “can’t get out of the immune dysfunction hole,” he said, “and we don’t know how to help them out of it.”
That’s where the digital twins would come in.
The project, which is expected to take five years, will use participant data like medical records and frequent blood samples to refine models that reflect the person’s immune responses, the release said. The idea is to allow researchers to learn from these digital twins, and “evaluate potential treatment strategies” before the treatments are actually administered.
Participant data will be collected by three clinical partners: Wake Forest University School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersking School of Medicine, and Washington University School of Medicine. Meanwhile, the DNA Medicine Institute and InflammaSense, both med-tech companies, will contribute testing and monitoring technology.
By the project’s end, researchers hope to create a platform that can help clinicians make decisions about treatments to which patients might react differently, improving their health outcomes.