Related papers: Anergy in self-directed B lymphocytes from a stati…
Haematopoiesis is the process of generation of blood cells. Lymphopoiesis generates lymphocytes, the cells in charge of the adaptive immune response. Disruptions of this process are associated with diseases like leukaemia, which is…
Dendritic cells are antigen presenting cells that provide a vital link between the innate and adaptive immune system. Research into this family of cells has revealed that they perform the role of coordinating T-cell based immune responses,…
We consider the problem of self tolerance in the frame of a minimalistic model of the idiotypic network. A node of this network represents a population of B lymphocytes of the same idiotype which is encoded by a bit string. The links of the…
Immune cells learn about their antigenic targets using tactile sense: during recognition, a highly organized yet dynamic motif, named immunological synapse, forms between immune cells and antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Via synapses,…
In the human immune system, T-helper cells are able to differentiate into two lymphocyte subsets: Th1 and Th2. The intracellular signaling pathways of differentiation form a dynamic regulation network by secreting distinctive types of…
The problem of \emph{statistical recognition} is considered, as it arises in immunobiology, namely, the discrimination of foreign antigens against a background of the body's own molecules. The precise mechanism of this…
B-cell repertoires are characterized by a diverse set of receptors of distinct specificities generated through two processes of somatic diversification: V(D)J recombination and somatic hypermutations. B cell clonal families stem from the…
Regulatory T cells (Treg) have recently been identified as playing a central role in allergy and during allergen-specific immunotherapy. We have extended our previous mathematical model describing the nonlinear dynamics of Th1-Th2…
Our main tenet argues that the primary role of positive thymic selection and the resulting T cell population is the maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium with self MHC-self peptide complexes. The homeostatic T cell repertoire can…
Affinity maturation of antibodies during immune responses is achieved by multiple rounds of somatic hypermutation and subsequent preferential selection of those B cells that express B cell receptors with improved binding characteristics for…
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…
It has been known for some time that human autoimmune diseases can be triggered by viral infections. Several possible mechanisms of interactions between a virus and immune system have been analysed, with a prevailing opinion being that the…
A Cayley tree model of idiotypic networks that includes both B cell and antibody dynamics is formulated and analyzed. As in models with B cells only, localized states exist in the network with limited numbers of activated clones surrounded…
Complete understanding of the mechanisms regulating the proliferation and differentiation that takes place during human immune CD8+ T cell responses is still lacking. Human clinical data is usually limited to blood cell counts, yet the…
Subclasses of lymphocytes carry different functional roles to work together to produce an immune response and lasting immunity. Additionally to these functional roles, T and B-cell lymphocytes rely on the diversity of their receptor chains…
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…
Flowing blood displays a phenomenon called margination, in which leukocytes and platelets are preferentially found near blood vessel walls, while erythrocytes are depleted from these regions. Here margination is investigated using direct…
Despite initial success, cancer therapies often fail due to the emergence of drug-resistant cells. In this study, we use a mathematical model to investigate how cancer evolves over time, specifically focusing on the state of the tumor when…
During chronic infection, HIV-1 engages in a rapid coevolutionary arms race with the host's adaptive immune system. While it is clear that HIV exerts strong selection on the adaptive immune system, the characteristics of the somatic…
Immunotherapies use components of the patient immune system to selectively target cancer cells. The use of CAR T cells to treat B-cell malignancies --leukaemias and lymphomas-- is one of the most successful examples, with many patients…