Mantis Biotech is making 'digital twins' of humans to help solve medicine's data availability problem | TechCrunch

Large language models trained on vast datasets could speed genomics research, streamline clinical documentation, improve real-time diagnostics, support clinical decision-making, accelerate drug discovery, and even generate synthetic data to advance experiments. But their promise to transform biomedical research often runs into a bottleneck: beyond the structured data healthcare relies on, these models struggle in edge cases like rare diseases and unusual conditions, where reliable, representative data is scarce. New York-based Mantis Biotech claims it’s developing the solution to fill this data availability gap. The company’s platform integrates disparate sources of data to make synthetic datasets that can be used to build so-called “digital twins” of the human body: physics-based, predictive models of anatomy, physiology, and behavior. The company is pitching these digital twins for use in data aggregation and analysis. These digital twins could be used for studying and testing new medical procedures, training surgical robots, and simulating and predicting medical issues or even patterns of behavior. For example, a sports team could predict the likelihood of a specific NFL player developing an Achilles heel injury based on their recent performance, training load, diet, and how long they’ve been active, Mantis’ founder and CEO Georgia Witchel explained to TechCrunch in a recent interview. To build these twins, Mantis’ platform first takes data from a variety of sources suc...