Communications of the ACM
Biomedical Digital Twins
Credit: Yurchanka Siarhei
For more than a decade, computational scientist Juan R. Perilla of the University of Delaware has been working to digitally reconstruct a very particular structure of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Perilla and his colleagues set out to create an active three-dimensional digital model of the virus shell, or capsid, that researchers could study and probe as if they were working with an actual particle. The processing power required to build the simulation was significant, according to Perilla, because the model needed to track how a change in one area would impact the interactions of all two million atoms in the particle.
Perilla and his group succeeded in constructing the model and demonstrating various means of testing the simulation to ensure it behaves as it would in the real world. "You can actually interrogate the simulated particle, pushing and pulling on the capsid as if you were testing the actual physical system," Perilla says. "You forget that it's a digital copy that has been validated physically."
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