The use of digital twins is not something new. They are used to create entire cities and see the most successful ecological or urban policies or in medicine, to test different drugs. Now this is Technology comes to oncology to evaluate how a patient will respond to a certain treatment.
A team of scientists, led by Uzma Asghar, scientific director of Concr and oncologist, has shown that they can accurately recreate clinical trials of new treatments using digital twins of real cancer patients. The technology, called FarrSight-Twin, which is based on algorithms used by astrophysicists to discover black holeswas presented at the 36th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapies in Barcelona, Spyñto.
Asghar maintains that this approach could be used by experts to conduct virtual clinical trials before testing new treatments on patients. Could also be used in conjunction with clinical trials with a digital twin for each patient participant, who together could form a control group for any trial. Ultimately, it could mean that patients could have different treatments tested in their digital twin to help select the most suitable treatment in advance.
“Around the world, we spend billions of dollars developing new cancer treatments,” says Asghar. Some will prove successful, but most will not. Can use digital twins to represent individual patientscreate clinical trial cohorts and compare treatments to see if they are likely to be successful before testing them on real patients.”
Each digital twin is created from biological data from thousands of cancer patients that have been treated in different ways. This information is combined to recreate a real patient’s cancer with molecular data about their tumor. This digital twin makes it possible to predict how a patient is likely to respond to a treatment.
Asghar and his team used this approach to recreate published clinical trials with a digital twin representing each real patient who participated in the trial. Overall, the digital assays accurately predicted the outcome of real clinical trials in all simulated clinical studies. Further testing showed that when patients received the treatment predicted by FarrSight-Twin as the best, they had a response rate (tumor shrinkage) 75%, compared to 53.5% response when patients received a different treatment. “Response rate” means the proportion of patients whose tumors shrank after treatment.
The tests used in the study presented at the symposium were performed in patients with breast, pancreatic or ovarian cancer. They were phase II or III trials that compared two different drug therapies, including anthracyclines, taxanes, drugs based in platinum, capecitabine and hormonal treatments.
“We are excited to apply this type of technology by simulating clinical trials in different types of tumors to predict the response of patients to different chemotherapies and the results are encouraging – concludes Ashgar -. “We are currently developing this technology so that it can predict the treatment response of individual patients in the clinic and help doctors understand which chemotherapy will or will not be helpful, and this work is ongoing.”