Could digital twins test medical treatments for critically ill patients?

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…