E210: Beyond Alzheimer’s: Scaling Digital Twins Across Disease Areas

About this episode

The episode discusses the application of digital twins in clinical trials, particularly in Alzheimer's research, featuring an interview with Aaron Smith from Unlearn AI.

Digital twins have become one of the most promising tools in Alzheimer’s research, but the bigger story is what happens when they scale across disease areas. In this episode, Dr Andree Bates interviews Aaron Smith , Founder and Head of Machine Learning at Unlearn AI , about how “digital twin generators” can transform trial design by modelling realistic patient progression and improving statistical power without compromising the fundamentals of randomised controlled trials. Aaron shares his journey from academic mathematics into computer vision and machine learning, then into biopharma, where Unlearn began by building generative models that learn the joint distribution of clinical variables. In practice, that means the model can take baseline patient measurements and generate likely future progressions that are as indistinguishable from real clinical records as possible. The conversation dives into a key misconception: digital twins are not only about replacing control arms. Aaron explains a regulatory friendly approach where you keep standard trial structure, but add counterfactual information for every patient into the analysis. Unlearn’s best known method, ProCOVA (prognostic…

People in this episode

Host: Dr Andree Bates

Guest: Aaron Smith

Topics covered

• digital twins
• Alzheimer's research
• biopharma
• machine learning
• clinical trials
• statistical power

Keywords

• digital twins
• Alzheimer's
• trial design
• machine learning
• biopharma
• ProCOVA
• clinical variables

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Unlearn AI

Products: ProCOVA

More episodes of AI For Pharma Growth

• E221: The Diagnostic Room: The AI Governance Timeline Moved. Your Governance Exposure Didn't · June 9, 2026 · 28 min
• E220: The Intelligence Gap: Why Pharma's Biggest Deals Are Being Lost Before They Even Know They're Competing · June 2, 2026 · 23 min
• E219: Bridging the Data-Use Divide: How QuadraticMed’s Dr. Danielle Bower Bridges Medicine and Data Science to Unlock Real-World Evidence · May 26, 2026 · 36 min
• E218: How astrophysics methods used to study dark matter are now being applied to model cancer biology · May 19, 2026 · 32 min
• E217: The Diagnostic Room: Pilot purgatory: why pharma AI stalls after the first wins · May 12, 2026 · 47 min
• E216: When AI meets Cell Engineering · May 5, 2026 · 31 min