Using Digital Twins to Accelerate Drug Development

Getting enough patients with the right characteristics for control arms in clinical trials is difficult and can be fraught with ethical concerns. A startup called Unlearn.ai hopes to address this issue using digital twins, simulated patients for control arms that are generated using real-world data (RWD) and artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Adam Bluestein, “The digital twins that concern Fisher at Unlearn—which now employs about 60 people and this year raised $50 million in funding—are individualized computer simulations of people. “We’re taking historical data, real-world data, about a particular disease and how it progresses on current treatments, and encapsulating that within a computer model,” he says. “Then, if I enroll in a clinical trial, we take data from me at the beginning of the trial, put that into the model, and it creates simulations of what might happen to me in the future.” So, if the real you gets the experimental treatment, your digital twin gets run through an algorithm to see what would have happened if you didn’t.”

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(Source: Fast Company, November 28^th, 2022)