Related papers: Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Diseases

Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…

Mathematical disease modelling has long operated under the assumption that any one infectious disease is caused by one transmissible pathogen spreading among a population. This paradigm has been useful in simplifying the biological reality…

Human diseases spread over networks of contacts between individuals and a substantial body of recent research has focused on the dynamics of the spreading process. Here we examine a model of two competing diseases spreading over the same…

The immune response to a pathogen has two basic features. The first is the expansion of a few pathogen-specific cells to form a population large enough to control the pathogen. The second is the process of differentiation of cells from an…

The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self or non-self substances. It does this with the help of…

The innate immune system, acting as the first line of host defense, senses and adapts to foreign challenges through complex intracellular and intercellular signaling networks. Endotoxin tolerance and priming elicited by macrophages are…

Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…

Among various possible causes of autoimmune disease, an important role is played by infections that can result in a breakdown of immune tolerance, primarily through the mechanism of "molecular mimicry". In this paper we propose and analyse…

The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help…

When the body gets infected by a pathogen the immune system develops pathogen-specific immunity. Induced immunity decays in time and years after recovery the host might become susceptible again. Exposure to the pathogen in the environment…

The dynamics of infectious diseases propagating in populations depends both on human interaction patterns, the contagion process and the pathogenesis within hosts. The immune system follows a circadian rhythm and, consequently, the chance…

Simple ideas, endowed from the mathematical theory of control, are used in order to analyze in general grounds the human immune system. The general principles are minimization of the pathogen load and economy of resources. They should…

Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…

We argue that immune system is an adaptive complex system. It is shown that it has emergent properties. Its network structure is of the small world network type. The network is of the threshold type, which helps in avoiding autoimmunity. It…

The repertoire of lymphocyte receptors in the adaptive immune system protects organisms from diverse pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections. We develop a general…

Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…

Diseases emerge, persist and vanish in an ongoing battle for available hosts. Hosts, on the other hand, defend themselves by developing immunity that limits the ability of pathogens to reinfect them. We here explore a multi-disease system…

The recent pandemic emphasized the need to consider the role of human behavior in shaping epidemic dynamics. In particular, it is necessary to extend beyond the classical epidemiological structures to fully capture the interplay between the…

A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…

Starting from common assumptions, we build a rate equation model for multi-strain disease dynamics in terms of immune repertoire classes. We then move to a strain-level description where a low-order closure reminiscent of a pair…