Paper Outlines Roadmap for Digital Immune System

A new paper published in npj Digital Medicine has outlined a coordinated, step-by-step roadmap for the creation of a digital “twin” of the human immune system. Such a tool would be a breakthrough that enables precision medicine for a wide array of ailments, including cancer, autoimmune disease and viral infections like COVID-19.

“This is an effort that will require the collaboration of computational biologists, immunologists, clinicians, mathematicians and computer scientists,” says Tomas Helikar, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln biochemist who is one of 10 co-authors from six universities. “Trying to break down this complexity down into measurable and achievable steps has been a challenge. This paper is addressing that.”

Helikar’s work is inspired in part by his 7-year-old son, who required a lung transplant as an infant and will require a careful balance of immunosuppression drugs to prevent organ rejection without suppressing his immune system to the point it can’t keep infections and other diseases at bay.

Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health renewed a five-year $1.8 million grant for Helikar to continue his work in the area.  “The dream and goal are for it to be used for precision medicine at the level of an individual,” Helikar says. “Importantly, we change over time. Our immune system is programmed, reprogrammed and tweaked over time. It develops from birth and as we get older, it continues developing, often in ways we don’t like. It becomes weaker, we have cancers and our immune system is not keeping up.  Our goal is to create digital twins that are not just specific to ourselves, but specific to that point in time—taking into consideration all of our past.”

Although the eventual goal is to make virtual models at the individual level that would enable doctors to deliver treatments precisely designed for the individual, the first step in the roadmap is the creation of a generic model that reflects common biological mechanisms.

The task could take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, but Hellikar believes it is achievable. “I think we have enough data and technological advancements in terms of methods and software tools, that the first draft or first version of the virtual immune system could be built with data that already exists. It may not be personalizable yet, but you could start with it as a working prototype.”

The authors of “Building Digital Twins of the Human Immune System: Toward a Roadmap” are part of an umbrella working group of about 200 scientists organized for multiscale modeling of viral pandemics. The inter-agency working group is led by Reinhard Laubenbacher of the University of Florida and James Glazier of Indiana University, both co-authors. Since May, Helikar has been co-leading the working group with Glazier.