NSF, NIH and FDA support research in digital twin technology for biomedical applications
The U.S. National Science Foundation, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has awarded over $6 million in research funding across seven projects to explore the development of digital twins, dynamic virtual representations of physical objects or processes, for use in healthcare and biomedical research.
The awards are the first cohort of projects supported by the Foundations for Digital Twins as Catalyzers of Biomedical Technological Innovation program (FDT-BioTech), a partnership between NSF, NIH and FDA. The program was created to foster advances in mathematics, statistics, computational sciences and engineering required to develop responsive digital twin models that incorporate the abilities of artificial intelligence.
"Digital twins have the potential to remove common medical risks involved in patient monitoring and treatment, providing a framework for optimal decision-making," says Yulia Gel, program director in the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences, which leads the FDT-BioTech program. "Real-world use of these complex models could streamline clinical trials for safer development of drugs and medical devices."
The awarded research projects cover various topics, including the development of mathematical models for virtual clinical trials of cardiovascular medical devices, statistical tools for analyzing the ethical use of AI, digital twin-based studies of neurodegenerative diseases and AI-informed decision-making related to glucose metabolism in people with Type 1 diabetes. The awardees include one institution in an area supported by the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research program, which aims to build research capacity in states that have historically received lower levels of funding.