Single-cell-level digital twins for preterm birth prevention strategies.

Single-cell-level digital twins predict immune-targeting drugs like tetrahydrofolate and aspirin-lansoprazole to delay preterm labor by modulating immune signaling pathways.

• Why it matters: Preterm labor poses significant clinical challenges with ethical and financial barriers to traditional trials, necessitating innovative, precise modeling to identify effective therapies.
• What they did: The study developed SIMCO, a single-cell immunome digital twin framework trained on a mass cytometry atlas, to simulate immunomodulatory treatment effects on gestational length in pregnant individuals.
• The result: SIMCO identified top candidate drugs that delay labor primarily by enhancing mTOR signaling in innate immune cells and reducing JAK/STAT signaling in naïve CD4+ T cells, supporting personalized PTL prevention strategies.