The University of Vermont has won up to $38M from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The money, spread across five years, will fund digital twins for critically ill patients.
Dr. An leads the effort, which goes by the name ReSCUED. Its target is the runaway immune response behind sepsis and other severe conditions, a problem that has resisted treatment for decades.
Under the approach, clinicians would take blood every six hours and track physiological signals continuously. Those readings feed a mathematical twin of the patient. The model is then used to test how existing treatments might work better.
The team argues that critical illness is too complex for any single clinician to interpret in real time. AI, they say, can find patterns in that biology fast enough to shape treatment.
UVM’s Larner College of Medicine anchors a nationwide group that blends clinical, computational and biotechnology know-how. A bedside molecular testing device, first built for the International Space Station, will come from an industry partner based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Advocates say a digital twin could project how an illness will unfold in one specific patient. Care could then be tailored to that person instead of a statistical average.
