Related papers: Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Diseases
Organisms maintain the status quo, holding key physiological variables constant to within an acceptable tolerance, and yet adapt with precision and plasticity to dynamic changes in externalities. What organizational principles ensure such…
A major contribution to the onset and development of autoimmune disease is known to come from infections. An important practical problem is identifying the precise mechanism by which the breakdown of immune tolerance as a result of immune…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Despite the enormous relevance of zoonotic infections to world- wide public health, and despite much effort in modeling individual zoonoses, a fundamental understanding of the disease dynamics and the nature of outbreaks arising in such…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Understanding and modelling the complexity of the immune system is a challenge that is shared by the ImmunoComplexiT$^1$ thematic network from the RNSC. The immune system is a complex biological, adaptive, highly diversified, self-organized…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
This paper analyzes a simplified model of viral infection and evolution using the 'grand canonical ensemble' and formalisms from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to enumerate all possible viruses and to derive thermodynamic…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…
Despite being similar in structure, functioning, and size viral pathogens enjoy very different mostly well-defined ways of life. They occupy their hosts for a few days (influenza), for a few weeks (measles), or even lifelong (HCV), which…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
The rise of antimicrobial drug resistance is an imminent threat to global health that has warranted, and duly received, considerable attention within the medical, microbiological and modelling communities. Outbreaks of drug-resistant…
A class of stochastic vector-borne infectious disease models is derived and studied. The class type is determined by a general nonlinear incidence rate of the disease. The disease spreads in a highly random environment with variability from…
Understanding dynamics of an infectious disease helps in designing appropriate strategies for containing its spread in a population. Recent mathematical models are aimed at studying dynamics of some specific types of infectious diseases. In…
We introduce a model called Host-Pathogen game for studying biological competitions. Notably, we focus on the invasive dynamics of external agents, like bacteria, within a host organism. The former are mapped to a population of defectors…
Tissue homeostasis, the biological process of maintaining a steady state in tissue via control of cell proliferation, death, and metabolic function, is essential for the development, growth, maintenance, and proper function of living…
The immune system is a real-time example of an evolving system that navigates the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. How this system responds to disease and vaccination is discussed. Of particular focus is the case…
Tumor-immune interactions are shaped by both antigenic heterogeneity and stochastic perturbations in the tumor microenvironment, yet the mathematical mechanisms underlying immune phase transitions remain poorly understood. We propose a…
Uncontrolled, excessive production of pro-inflammatory mediators from immune cells and traumatized tissues can cause systemic inflammatory issues like sepsis, one of the ten leading causes of death in the United States and one of the three…