Double the Care? How Digital Twins Will Revolutionise Personalised Medicine
Summary
- Digital twins in manufacturing and transport have been around for years; now, the era for digital twins in healthcare is gaining momentum with the potential to transform diagnostics, treatment, and monitoring of patients and their health.
- Driving factors are particularly the need to shift towards preventative healthcare and personalized precision medicine.
- Regulatory bodies are approaching this new frontier with an open mind, with the FDA identifying an important role for modelling and simulation in its strategic priorities.
- This presents a massive opportunity for investors and startup founders to capitalize on this growing market and develop innovative solutions to revolutionize healthcare.
- A few hurdles still need to be overcome, including data collection, integration, and scalability, to make digital twins more precise, efficient, and effective.
1. Introduction
Healthcare is an industry that has been witnessing tremendous technological advancements over the years, and one such breakthrough technology is digital twins. Digital twins, virtual replicas of physical objects or systems, have made significant strides in healthcare and are expected to revolutionise how healthcare is delivered.
There are several potential use cases: Digital twins can be used to create personalized virtual models of patients, which can help doctors predict how a patient will respond to different treatments, optimize treatments based on real-time data, and monitor patients remotely.
As VentureBeat puts it: “Although simulations have been around for some time, today’s medical digital twins represent an important new take. These digital twins can create useful models based on information from wearable devices, omics, and patient records to connect the dots across processes that span patients, doctors, and healthcare organizations, as well as drug and device manufacturers.”
In this article, we will explore the potential of digital twins in healthcare, which companies are leading the way in this space, and which hurdles must be overcome to make health-oriented doppelgangers a reality.
2. Urgency: Why Digital Twins Matter
Digital twins have the potential to become a crucial component of healthcare, as they offer a new and innovative way of providing personalized care to patients. The rise of digital twins in healthcare can be attributed to several factors, including the growing importance of regulatory standards and the shift towards preventative healthcare.
Regulatory standards in the healthcare industry have become increasingly strict and demanding in the last years, with organizations seeking to maintain patient safety and ensuring compliance with government regulations. Digital twins can help meet these standards by providing a comprehensive and virtual view of a patient’s health status and supporting personalized treatments that considers each patient’s unique needs.
Another factor driving the rise of digital twins in healthcare is the need to shift towards preventative healthcare. Traditionally, healthcare has focused on “sick-care”, or treating patients after they become sick. However, developing digital twins can help shift the focus toward preventing illness and disease by identifying risk factors and predicting health outcomes. By leveraging the data from digital twins, healthcare providers can better support patients in making lifestyle changes and adopting preventative measures.
Moreover, the new realities of the healthcare industry, such as an ageing population, the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, and the rising cost of healthcare, have created a pressing need for new and innovative approaches to healthcare. Digital twins offer a powerful way to address these challenges by providing more accurate diagnoses, targeted treatments, and efficient healthcare delivery.
3. Developing Digital Twins: In Silico Data
Digital twins rely on in silico data, generated through computer simulations that are often based on real world (patient) data. In silico data allows researchers to model the behavior of biological systems, including cells, organs, and entire organisms. This data can be used to create virtual models of patients, test different treatments, predict how a patient will respond to those treatments, and identify biomarkers, which can be used to develop new therapies and diagnostics.
And what is the regulatory landscape saying about digital twins? By all indications, FDA is approaching this new frontier with an open mind. Indeed, FDA has identified an essential role for modelling and simulation in its strategic priorities.
“FDA’s Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL) has committed significant resources for transforming computational modeling from a valuable scientific tool to a valuable regulatory tool because of its potential for significant cost-savings in evaluating medical devices, simulating performance under scenarios that may not be possible with human use or that could more effectively be evaluated with simulation.” Read more here.
Moreover, the agency has entered into a partnership with Siemens regarding digital twins in medical device development, where the FDA provided nearly $2 million to Siemens for a pilot program to show how digital twins could improve product quality, development, and commercialization. Find more here.
4. Market Snapshot
The market size of digital twins is expected to grow significantly over the next several years. The global digital twin market is expected to grow from USD 3.1 billion in 2020 to USD 48.2 billion by 2026, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58.9% during the forecast period (MarketsandMarkets).
In the healthcare sector, the digital twin market is also expected to experience significant growth. The global digital twin market in healthcare is expected to grow at a CAGR of between 21 to 25% through 2031. Several reports estimate that the market size was as high as USD 2.2 billion in 2020 and is projected to exceed USD 7 billion by 2028 (ResearchAndMarkets).
While these estimates indicate significant growth in the market for digital twins, it is important to note that the use of digital twins in healthcare is still in the early stages, and there is significant potential for further growth and development in the years to come especially when one considers the size of the opportunity for precision healthcare.
This presents a massive opportunity for investors and startup founders to capitalize on this growing market and develop innovative solutions that can revolutionize healthcare.
5. Various Approaches to Digital Twins in Healthcare
There are several approaches to digital twins in healthcare, including using virtual models of organs, using patient-specific models, and using real-time data to optimize treatments.
An extensive way of segmenting the market can be found in this VentureBeat article outlining approaches under:
- Personalised medicine (digital twins making it easier to customise medical treatments to individuals);
- Improving healthcare organisations (e.g. reducing the time to treat stroke patients); and
- Drug and medical device development (improving the design, development, testing, and monitoring of new medical devices and drugs).
Several companies are working on digital twins in healthcare, which are taking different approaches to apply this technology in various applications. We have segmented them into the following company buckets:
- Healthcare equipment and imaging companies: Siemens Healthineers, GE Healthcare, and Medtronic are all major players in the healthcare equipment and imaging space, and are focused on developing digital twins of medical devices and simulations of medical procedures to optimize device placement and programming before implantation.
- Simulation software providers: Dassault Systèmes and Ansys are both software companies that specialize in simulation and modeling, and are using digital twins to create virtual models of organs, tissues, and medical devices for surgical planning and device testing.
- Biotech and pharmaceutical companies: Synthego is a biotech company that is focused on developing a digital twin platform for genetic engineering. By creating virtual models of genetic workflows, Synthego aims to optimize gene editing and reduce the risk of errors.
- Clinical trial simulation companies: Virtonomy is an R&D and clinical trial simulation company that uses digital twins to create virtual patient populations for use in medtech development. By simulating device-specific consequences on populations of virtual patients, Virtonomy aims to accelerate the development and approval of new devices and reduce the cost and risk associated with clinical trials.
- Personalized treatment and preventative care approaches: Sanome is a digital health company that uses digital twin technology to develop early warning systems for patient health deteriorations in clinical settings. By using an intelligent feedback loop the company identifies biomarker combinations that alert healthcare professionals to health changes such as hospital-acquired infections. To date deployed in two hospitals, Sanome can continuously evaluate new biomarker combinations that can be translated into diagnostics. Neko Health, the new venture of Spotify’s Daniel Ek, is a company creating digital twins of elderly patients with chronic diseases to improve care management and quality of life. By using these various approaches, digital twin technology can be used to transform healthcare and improve patient outcomes. As Techcrunch puts it: “Neko, Daniel Ek’s next play, is another spin on preventative healthcare”.
In summary, the companies have different focus areas, with some specializing in medical imaging while others focus on gene editing, cardiac devices, or patient-specific digital twins for drug development. However, they all share the goal of leveraging digital twin technology to improve patient outcomes and advance medical research.
6. Hurdles to Overcome for Wide-spread Adoption
Despite the immense potential of digital twins in healthcare, several challenges still need to be overcome before widespread adoption can occur. One of the main challenges is the need for interoperability between different healthcare systems, which makes it difficult to share patient data between other systems. Another challenge is the cost of implementing digital twins, which can be high for smaller healthcare providers.
Some of the critical factors that will need to be addressed to make digital twins in healthcare a reality include:
- Data collection and integration: Digital twins rely on collecting and integrating large amounts of data from various sources, which can be a major technical challenge. Efforts are needed to improve the interoperability of healthcare systems and enable secure and reliable data sharing.
- Computational power and speed: Creating and simulating digital twins requires significant computational power and speed. Advances in cloud computing and artificial intelligence are helping to overcome these challenges, but further improvements are needed to ensure that digital twins can be created and simulated quickly and reliably.
- Ethical and regulatory considerations: The use of digital twins raises significant ethical and regulatory concerns, particularly around data privacy, security, and ownership. Efforts are needed to establish clear guidelines and standards to ensure that digital twins are used responsibly and ethically.
- Cost-effectiveness and scalability: Digital twins can be expensive to develop and implement and may only be feasible for some healthcare settings. Efforts are needed to improve cost-effectiveness and scalability, such as by developing open-source platforms and using low-cost sensors and data sources.
In conclusion, digital twins have the potential to revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered, making it more precise, efficient, and effective. The growing market size presents a tremendous opportunity for investors and startup founders to capitalize on this trend and develop innovative solutions that can revolutionize healthcare. It is only a matter of time before digital twins become a mainstream technology in healthcare.
