Digital Twins are a Key Enabling Technology for Personalized Medicine

Digital twins (DTs) have emerged in recent years as a very promising technology for individualized health management and recovery. Each DT is built upon a computational model that captures some aspect of human biology and is typically intended to be used with individuals to either restore their health or maintain it. In many cases, DT projects reach "from bench to bedside" and often involve commercialization to bring the final product to the end-user. The purpose of this perspective is to highlight DT technology as an opportunity for the mathematical modeling community and look at DT development from both the academic and commercial viewpoints. Since DT technology is applied widely in biology, beyond health care, there are several references at the end to applications in ecology, biotechnology, agriculture, and synthetic biology.