IMO Workshop 14: Digital Twins

Welcome to the registration page for the 14th Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) workshop at the Moffitt Cancer Center. Now in its 14th year we are supported by our grant from the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC) on the Delta Ecology of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and the Moffitt Cancer Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy (CoE). The IMO workshop is designed to motivate and facilitate a hands-on modeling experience focused on developing mechanistic digital twins for different cancers. The workshop is comprised of both an educational event and competition and divides participants into multiple teams combining clinical, experimental and theoretical members. These teams integrate their energies to develop and implement mathematical model driven digital twins across a range of cancers. The teams are expected to come up with a digital twin representation for a given cancer and use it in to give some therpauetic inights and give a presentation on what was achieved within 4.5 intense days.

As always, we will have several independent judges to view both the specific aims and the closing presentations to decide the winning team. To facilitate integration and motivate participation we are offering an Amazon gift voucher to active participants of the winning team and to the runner up team. In addition, to facilitate further development of the winning project we are offering a $50K pilot grant (generously funded by Moffitt Cancer Center) to the leaders of the winning team.

As with last years workshop there will be a "speed dating for scientists" to break the ice among diverse group of participants on the 1st. The opening presentation on the 2nd will summarize what is expected of the teams and serve to motivate the subsequent hands on model development sessions. We plan to have a separate poster session on the evening of the 2nd to allow participants to showcase their own research. Participation in the workshop requires registration in order to generate the teams and give numbers for the food and beverages we are providing throughout the workshop.

We are offering deluxe travel awards for external participation!!! Each award will cover flight + accommodation + meals for up to 6 nights and allow for both national and international scientists to participate in this unique hands on educational event. If you are either a PhD student, Postdoctoral student or faculty member with a passion for research and a desire to better understand how to develop and utilize digital twins in shaping patient specific therapeutic strategies as well as how to build integrated models then please apply during the registration process. Please note: the travel awards are limited and will be offered on a competitive basis, so application does not guarantee participation. If you are able to cover your own expenses, please indicate this during the registration process.

Please note

TRAVEL AWARD APPLICATIONS WILL BE CLOSING ON Friday the 25th of September 2026 at 5pm EST. AWARD WINNERS WILL BE CONTACTED before the 1st of October 2026.

What: Moffitt Cancer Center under the auspices of the Center for Evolutionary Therapy (CoE) has been developing evolutionary therapies with the goal to control cancer rather than eradicate it. There has also been efforts to develop multistrike (or extinction therapies) that leverge the evolution informed combation and sequencing of drugs. Both of these efforts have led to clinical trials across a range of cancers.

Developing mathematical model representations of real cancer patient dynamics has been at the heart of much of the work being done within the CoE long before we called it digital twins we used the term virtual patient. One cruicial difference from our earlier work on virtual patients is a focus specifically on patient dynamics and using collections of these individual digital twins to develop cohorts that can be used to forecast clinical trial outcomes and optimize trial design. Much of our work has centered on prostate cancer but we are also actively working on skin, ovarian, breast and lung cancer digital twins. The theme of this workshop is broadly digital twins or more specifically mechanistic cancer digital twins which is about integrating patient specific dynamic data using mathematical models to make predictions and develop novel therapuetic strategies and clinical trials. Potential theme that teams might tackle are:

(i) Developing synthetic controls for single arm trials

(ii) Integrating microenvironment modulating therapies

(iii) Developing multi-arm trials that classify patients based on dynamics

(iv) Accounting for measurement uncertainty in treatment decision making

(v) Developming multi-drug therapies that exploit patient response dynamics

When: Sunday, 6PM, 1st November 2026 - Friday 2PM, 6th November 2026.

Where:

Speed dating: SRB Atrium, 6PM 1st November.

Intoductory presentation: SRB Murphey, 9AM 2nd November.

Poster session: New World, 7PM 2nd November.

Working group sessions: Various rooms, 2nd November - 5th November.

Closing presentations: SRB Murphey, 9AM 6th November.

Chair and contact

The IMO Workshop is chaired and organized by the IMO Department Chair, Sandy Anderson. For more information concerning participation or about the workshop in general please contact IMO Department Assistant Danae Paris directly.