Digital twins are well established in industrial settings, but there has not been wide adoption in biomedical settings. Digital twins for biomedical applications are now possible with the inclusion of artificial intelligence and the potential to combine mechanistic and clinical models that learn and adjust for human variability.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$32.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 1 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $119.00 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to the full article PDF.
USD 39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
References
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins (National Academies Press, 2024).
Coveney, P., Highfield, R., Stahlberg, E. & Vázquez, M. Digital twins and big AI: the future of truly individualised healthcare. npj Digit. Med. 8, 494 (2025).
Sel, K. et al. Building digital twins for cardiovascular health: from principles to clinical impact. J. Am. Heart Assoc. 13, e031981 (2024).
Wolpert, D. M. & Miall, R. C. Forward models for physiological motor control. Neural Netw. 9, 1265–1279 (1996).
Bates, J. H. T. Lung Mechanics: An Inverse Modeling Approach (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
Yadan, Z. et al. An expert review of the inverse problem in electrocardiographic imaging for the non-invasive identification of atrial fibrillation drivers. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 240, 107676 (2023).
Sel, K. et al. Survey and perspective on verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification of digital twins for precision medicine. npj Digit. Med. 8, 40 (2025).
Ates, H. C. et al. End-to-end design of wearable sensors. Nat. Rev. Mater. 7, 887–907 (2022).
Akbarialiabad, H. et al. Bridging silicon and carbon worlds with digital twins and on-chip systems in drug discovery. npj Syst. Biol. Appl. 10, 150 (2024).
Tudor, B. H. et al. A scoping review of human digital twins in healthcare applications and usage patterns. npj Digit. Med. 8, 587 (2025).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Clancy, C.E., Landman, B.A. Towards credible digital twins for basic and preclinical research. Nat Rev Methods Primers 6, 5 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-025-00454-3
Published:
Version of record:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-025-00454-3