Digital twin opens way to effective treatment of inflammatory diseases

New digital molecular programs, which organise proteins linked to inflammatory diseases for individual patients, may revolutionize this branch of medicine. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, in Sweden, have developed so-called “digital twins” that can cater to patients’ specific situation, providing better insights for targeted treatment, states the university In a press release.

This is because inflammatory diseases have complex disease mechanisms that can differ from patient to patient with the same diagnosis. This means that currently available drugs have little effect on many people. Using so-called digital twins, researchers have now obtained a deeper understanding of the “off and on” proteins that control these diseases. The study, which is published in Cell Reports Medicine, can lead to more personalized drug therapies.

Many patients with inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, never feel fully healthy despite being on medication. It is a problem that causes significant suffering and expense.  

In an inflammatory disease, thousands of genes alter the way they interact in different organs and cell types. Moreover, the pathological process varies from one patient to another with the same diagnosis, and even within the same patient at different times.

Artificial intelligence can prevent chronic inflammation

Researchers at the Technical University of Nuremberg (FAU) are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent chronic inflammation.

Digital twins bring new possibilities

Every physiological process can be described with mathematical equations. This advanced digital modelling technique can be adjusted to a patient’s unique circumstances by analysing the activity of each and every gene in thousands of individual cells from blood and tissue. Such a digital twin can be used to calculate the physiological outcome if a condition changes, such as the dosage of a drugs.

Digital twins have revealed to the researcher’s new opportunities for the effective treatment of serious diseases.

“The methods can be developed to tailor the right combination of drugs for “on” proteins for individual patients,” Dr Benson continues. “The programmes we describe will be made available to the research community so that more clinical studies can be done of patients with different immune diseases.”

Detecting chronic intestinal inflammation with a pill

In the Netherlands, around 90 thousand people have a chronic intestinal disease, such as Crohn’s disease. These inflammations are easy to detect. The only thing you need for that is an endoscopy: a camera that goes into the intestinal tract. “Invasive and unpleasant”.

Broad picture of the affected organs

In the current study, the researchers combined analyses of a mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis and digital twins of human patients with various inflammatory diseases.

“Even though only the joints were inflamed in mice, we found that thousands of genes changed their activity in different cell types in ten organs, including the skin, spleen, liver and lungs,” says Dr Benson. “As far as I’m aware, this is the first time science has obtained such a broad picture of how many organs are affected in rheumatoid arthritis. This is partly due to the difficulty of physically sampling so many different organs.”