Keynote speaker

Gunnar Cedersund is associate professor and docent at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Linköping University, and is/was guest professor in biomedicine at Örebro University.

Gunnar’s main field of research concerns the development of digital twins – computational models for the human body. His research combines pre-clinical and clinical data collection to develop, test, refine, and ultimately validate these models, with the actual computational modelling, in an integrated fashion. The computational models use a combination of machine learning, large language models, and mechanistic multi-scale models, which together can do things none of them can do individually. The digital twin models are also brought into end-usage using eHealth devices, and are already being tested for e.g. prevention, rehabilitation, and drug development.

Key Note Lecture

The topic for the key note lecture is “Digital twins for individuals: a new, holistic, and interactive understanding of health and disease".

Lecture description: Biology has over the last decades been characterized by a constant increase in complexity. New genes, proteins, modifications, regulations, etc are discovered in a rapid pace, and the complexity we can unravel about living systems is ever increasing. It is therefore critical that we also start to bring order in this complexity. In this overview lecture, I will show how computational modelling and systems biology can be used to sort out hypotheses and create consensus about living systems. We will look at examples of intracellular processes, organ systems, and how organ models come together to form a digital twin of a full individual. I will also outline how this digital twin is increasingly being tested in different end-usages, such as prevention, healthcare, eldercare, and even forensics. This idea also forms the basis for M4-HEALTH, a new network for health, featuring 16 Swedish universities, and more than 100 companies and other organizations.