Scientists are looking for new ways to develop better treatments for cancer, one of the world’s deadliest diseases. One of the latest treatments is technology that is used to create digital replicas of cancer patients for drug testing.

Researchers have developed a technology called FarSight-Twin that can create ‘digital twins’ of cancer patients to simulate clinical trials, improving the process of testing cancer treatments.

Presented at the 36th EORTC-NCI-AACR symposium in Barcelona, ​​the technique uses algorithms from astrophysics, similar to those that identify black holes, to model and predict treatment responses.

The team, led by Dr Uzma Asghar of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, believes FarSight-Twin could allow researchers to run virtual clinical trials before testing drugs on real patients .

By creating a digital twin for each patient in a study, this approach can also help create control groups, reduce the need for placebo trials, and speed up the evaluation process.

Each digital twin is designed from vast biological and molecular data from past cancer cases, recreating an individual patient’s cancer profile.

The digital model can then simulate different treatments to predict which treatment may work best, and provide a clearer idea of ​​treatment response.

In remodelled trials, when patients received the treatment recommended by Farsite-Twin, 75% experienced tumor shrinkage, compared with 53.5% in those receiving other treatments.

Dr. Asghar’s team used data from breast, pancreatic and ovarian cancer patients in their trials.

“By simulating clinical trials on different cancers, we are seeing promising results in predicting response rates,” he said.