Related papers: Simulating the Dynamics of T Cell Subsets Througho…
System dynamics and agent based simulation models can both be used to model and understand interactions of entities within a population. Our modeling work presented here is concerned with understanding the suitability of the different types…
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…
The study of immune system aging, i.e. immunosenescence, is a relatively new research topic. It deals with understanding the processes of immunodegradation that indicate signs of functionality loss possibly leading to death. Even though it…
Although there are various types of cancer treatments, none of these currently take into account the effect of ageing of the immune system and hence altered responses to cancer. Recent studies have shown that in vitro stimulation of T cells…
The human adaptive immune response is known to weaken in advanced age, resulting in increased severity of pathogen-born illness, poor vaccine efficacy, and a higher prevalence of cancer in the elderly. Age-related erosion of the T-cell…
Regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a crucial role in mediating immune response. Yet an algorithmic understanding of the role of Tregs in adaptive immunity remains lacking. Here, we present a biophysically realistic model of Treg mediated…
The ability of the adaptive immune system to respond to arbitrary pathogens stems from the broad diversity of immune cell surface receptors (TCRs). This diversity originates in a stochastic DNA editing process (VDJ recombination) that acts…
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…
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…
Recently we have used a cellular automata model which describes the dynamics of a multi-connected network to reproduce the refractory behavior and aging effects obtained in immunization experiments performed with mice when subjected to…
We investigate a model of cell division in which the length of telomeres within the cell regulate their proliferative potential. At each cell division the ends of linear chromosomes change and a cell becomes senescent when one or more of…
The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
This paper investigates the dynamics of immune response and autoimmunity with particular emphasis on the role of regulatory T cells (Tregs), T cells with different activation thresholds, and cytokines in mediating T cell activity. Analysis…
We are interested in modeling theoretical immunology within a statistical mechanics flavor: focusing on the antigen-independent maturation process of B-cells, in this paper we try to revise the problem of self vs non-self discrimination by…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs…
We present a probabilistic T-cell model that includes negative selection and takes contrasting models of tissue-restricted antigen (TRA) expression in the thymus into account. We start from the basic model of van den Berg, Rand, and…
Cellular senescence is thought to play a major role in age-related diseases, which cause nearly 67% of all human deaths worldwide. Recent research in mice showed that exercising mice had higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps…