Related papers: Theoretical Aspects of Immunity
Advances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the ageing of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning…
An essential feature of the adaptive immune system is the proliferation of antigen-specific lymphocytes during an immune reaction to form a large pool of effector cells. This proliferation must be regulated to ensure an effective response…
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,…
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…
The clonal expansion of T cells during an infection is tightly regulated to ensure an appropriate immune response against invading pathogens. Although experiments have mapped the trajectory from expansion to contraction, the interplay…
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…
In this little vision paper we analyze the human immune system from a computer science point of view with the aim of understanding the architecture and features that allow robust, effective behavior to emerge from local sensing and actions.…
A reaction-diffusion model of receptor-toxin-antibody (RTA) interaction is studied numerically. The protective properties of an antibody against a given toxin are evaluated for a spherical cell placed into a toxin-antibody solution. The…
In this work we adopt a statistical mechanics approach to investigate basic, systemic features exhibited by adaptive immune systems. The lymphocyte network made by B-cells and T-cells is modeled by a bipartite spin-glass, where, following…
We consider a class of nonequilibrium systems of interacting agents with pairwise interactions and quenched disorder in the dynamics featuring, in the thermodynamic limit, phase transitions. We provide conditions on the microscopic…
This paper shows the global existence and boundedness of solutions of a reaction diffusion system modeling liver infections. The existence proof is presented step by step and the focus lies on the interpretation of intermediate results in…
Mathematical oncology is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field that uses mathematical models to enhance our understanding of cancer dynamics, including tumor growth, metastasis, and treatment response. Tumor-immune interactions play a…
Epidemic models study the spread of an undesired agent through a population, be it infectious diseases through a country, misinformation in online social media, or pests infesting a region. In combating these epidemics, we rely neither on…
Given the rapid evolution of threats to cyber systems, new management approaches are needed that address risk across all interdependent domains (i.e., physical, information, cognitive, and social) of cyber systems. Further, the traditional…
Evidence-based knowledge of infectious disease burden, including prevalence, incidence, severity and transmission, in different population strata and locations, and possibly in real time, is crucial to the planning and evaluation of public…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
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…
In most of the recent immunological literature the differences across antigen receptor populations are examined via non-parametric statistical measures of species overlap and diversity borrowed from ecological studies. While this approach…
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…
Zoonotic pathogens represent a growing global risk, yet the speed of adaptive immune activation across mammalian species remains poorly understood. Despite orders-of-magnitude differences in size and metabolic rate, we show that the time to…