Related papers: A model of host response to a multi-stage pathogen
A novel model of biological organisms is advanced, treating an organism as a self-consistent system subject to a pathogen flux. The principal novelty of the model is that it describes not some parts, but a biological organism as a whole.…
The immune system recognizes a myriad of invading pathogens and their toxic products. It does so with a finite repertoire of antibodies and T cell receptors. We here describe theories that quantify the immune system dynamics. We describe…
We study some simple mathematical models designed to test the following hypothesis: can a pathogen escape the immune system only because of its high probability of mutation? We propose both spatial and non-spatial models. In all of our…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
We consider a spatial stochastic model for a pathogen population growing inside a host that attempts to eliminate the pathogens through its immune system. The pathogen population is divided into different types. A pathogen can either…
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 strategic induction of cell death serves as a crucial immune defense mechanism for the eradication of pathogenic infections within host cells. Investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying immunogenic cell pathways has significantly…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
The adaptive and innate branches of the vertebrate immune system work in close collaboration to protect organisms from harmful pathogens. As an organism ages its immune system undergoes immunosenescence, characterized by declined…
In previous work, we studied host response to a pathogen which uses a cycle of immunologically distinct stages to establish and maintain infection. We showed that for generic parameter values, the system has a unique biologically meaningful…
Many illnesses are associated with an alteration of the immune system homeostasis due to any combination of factors, including exogenous bacterial insult, endogenous breakdown (e.g., development of a disease that results in immuno…
Agent-based models have been employed to describe numerous processes in immunology. Simulations based on these types of models have been used to enhance our understanding of immunology and disease pathology. We review various agent-based…
We present a methodology providing a one-directional link from within-host individual heterogeneity to population-level disease transmission dynamics. The methodology works in several steps. A within-host model is investigated numerically…
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
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…
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…
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…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…
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…
In this work we consider an epidemic system modelling the evolution of a spore-producing pathogen within a multi-host population of plants. Here we focus our analysis on the study of the stationary states. We first discuss the existence of…