The future of cancer treatment is now much brighter. Researchers created digital twins of patients and used them as virtual guinea pigs to test different drugs to predict which would be most effective against the type of cancer they had.

Imagine your doctor tells you that you have cancer and need treatment immediately. They give you two options and ask you to choose one. Obviously you want the most effective treatment to fight cancer. You exists based on your body makeup. So how do you choose between the two treatments offered?

Researchers have made this decision much easier. By creating digital twins of cancer patients, they can be used as virtual guinea pigs, recreating clinical trials to compare the effectiveness of treatments and predict how a patient will respond.

Dr Peters is a consultant medical oncologist and co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London. “Worldwide, we are spending billions of dollars to develop new cancer treatments,” said Uzma Asghar. ConcentratedA biotechnology company focused on personalized cancer treatments. “Some will be successful, but many will not. We can use digital twins to represent individual patients, create clinical trial groups, and compare treatments to see if they are successful before testing them with real patients.”

Digital twins are not new. NASA He claims the concept originated in the 1960s when he created multiple simulators to evaluate the oxygen tank explosion and subsequent engine damage on Apollo 13. But now, with advances in artificial intelligence, next-generation mobile communications and big data, the technology is on the rise and threatens to shake up many industries, including healthcare.

The researchers named their technology FarrSight-Twin. It is based on advanced algorithms widely used by astrophysicists and applied to large amounts of molecular and patient data. This enables different oncology datasets to be integrated into a single, holistic patient response model.

Simply put, each digital twin is created from biological data from thousands of cancer patients undergoing different types of treatments. All data is combined to reconstruct a twin of a real patient’s cancer with molecular data from the tumor. The twin could then be exposed to treatments taken directly from published clinical studies.

The researchers found that virtual clinical trials on digital twins accurately predicted the results of actual phase II or III clinical trials involving breast, pancreatic or ovarian cancer patients comparing two different drug treatments. The response rate for patients who received the treatment FarrSight-Twin predicted would be best for them was 75%; In patients who received a different treatment, this rate was 53.5%. Response rate is the percentage of patients whose cancer shrinks or disappears after treatment.

“We are excited to apply this type of technology by simulating clinical trials on different tumor types to predict patients’ response to different chemotherapies, and the results are encouraging,” Asghar said. “This technology means researchers can simulate patient trials at a much earlier stage of drug development and re-run the simulation multiple times to test different scenarios and maximize the likelihood of success. Checking patients to compare the effect of a new treatment with the current standard of care “It’s already being used to simulate the task.”

Researchers are currently using the Farr-Sight Twin to see if the technology can help predict which existing treatments will work best in patients with triple-negative breast cancer, a more aggressive type of tumor with a faster growth rate and higher risk of spread. This is a collaboration between researchers from Concr. Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)London, Durham University And Royal Marsden Hospitalalso in the United Kingdom.

They presented their findings on the use of digital twin technology to predict patients’ response to cancer treatment at the 36th European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer-National Cancer Institute-American Association for Cancer Research (EORTC-NCI-AACR/ENA). SymposiumHeld in Barcelona, ​​Spain, in late October 2024.

Source: EORTC-NCI-AACR (ENA)