Related papers: A model of host response to a multi-stage pathogen
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…
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…
The immune system can be thought as a complex network of different interacting elements. A cellular automaton, defined in shape-space, was recently shown to exhibit self-regulation and complex behavior and is, therefore, a good candidate to…
We consider a stochastic model for a pathogen population in the presence of an immune response, in which pathogen types are partially ordered by ancestry and the immune system must eliminate ancestor types before it can eliminate their…
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…
We consider a model of dynamics of the immune system. The model is based on three factors: occasional boosting and continuous waning of immunity and a general description of the period between subsequent boosting events. The antibody…
In the last decades, the interest to understand the connection between brain and body has grown notably. For example, in psychoneuroimmunology many studies associate stress, arising from many different sources and situations, to changes in…
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…
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…
We numerically study a dynamical system model of an idiotypic immune network with a small number of degrees of freedom. The model was originally introduced by Varela et.al., and describes antibodies interacting in a body in order to prepare…
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…
We consider multiple diseases spreading in a static Configuration Model network. We make standard assumptions that infection transmits from neighbor to neighbor at a disease-specific rate and infected individuals recover at a…
The adaptive immune system provides a diverse set of molecules that can mount specific responses against a multitude of pathogens. Memory is a key feature of adaptive immunity, which allows organisms to respond more readily upon…
The physical interpretation of the functioning of the adaptive immune system, which has been thoroughly characterized on genetic and molecular levels, provides a unique opportunity to define an adaptive self-organizing biological system in…
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…
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…
In epidemiological modelling, dynamics on networks, and in particular adaptive and heterogeneous networks have recently received much interest. Here we present a detailed analysis of a previously proposed model that combines heterogeneity…
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…
Divergence in antigen response of the immune network is discussed, based on shape-space modelling. The present model extends the shape-space model by introducing the evolution of specificity of idiotypes. When the amount of external antigen…
We consider a simple deterministic model which describes an asymmetric competition between an immune system with a specific and powerful response, and a virus with a broad toxicity and fast mutations. Interest in this model relies on the…