Collaborative Research: FDT-BioTech: Advancing Alzheimer's Disease Understanding and Treatments through Digital Twin Modeling

NSF Award Search · 01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $675,001 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

This project develops a new framework for digital twin modeling of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), combining clinical data, biomedical research, and advanced computational methods to support personalized medicine. A digital twin is a computational replica of an individual’s health state, enabling the prediction of disease progression and the evaluation of treatment options tailored to the patient. The project contributes to national efforts in healthcare innovation by addressing the urgent need for a better understanding, prediction, and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, which affects millions of Americans. This work also advances the broader field of personalized medicine by demonstrating how digital twin tools, powered by large language models, machine learning, and causal inference, can accelerate discovery and improve health outcomes. In addition, the project supports interdisciplinary collaboration across artificial intelligence, mathematics, and medicine, while offering new training opportunities for students in data science, modeling, and biomedical research. This project builds a unified modeling framework for population-based and personalized digital twins of AD. The approach uses large language models (LLMs) to extract causal networks of AD biomarkers from scientific literature and combines this with clinical data to generate personalized predictions. Conformal prediction techniques are applied to quantify uncertainty in model outputs, and optimization under limited da

Key facts

NSF award ID
2533995
Awardee
Pennsylvania State Univ University Park (PA)
SAM.gov UEI
NPM2J7MSCF61
PI
Wenrui Hao
Primary program
01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
INTERDISCIPLINARY PROPOSALS, Biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Software Institutes, Machine Learning Theory, STATISTICS
Estimated total
$675,001
Funds obligated
$675,001
Transaction type
Standard Grant
Period
09/01/2025 → 08/31/2028