Related papers: Towards a quantitative theory of tolerance
Some clinical and pre-clinical data suggests that treating some tumors at a mild, patient-specific dose might delay resistance to treatment and increase survival time. A recent mathematical model with sensitive and resistant tumor cells…
The US and Hungarian statistical records of the years 1900 and 1896, respectively, before the dramatic medical advances, show 32% and 27% deaths attributable to infections, whereas only 5% and 2% due to cancer. These data can be interpreted…
The phenomenon of immunological memory has been known for a long time. But, the underlying mechanism is poorly understood. According to the theory of clonal selection the response to a specific invading antigen (e.g., bacteria) is offered…
We consider self-tolerance and its failure -autoimmunity- in a minimal mathematical model of the idiotypic network. A node in the network represents a clone of B-lymphocytes and its antibodies of the same idiotype which is encoded by a…
When confronted with an undesired cell population, such as bacterial infections or tumors, we seek the most effective treatment, designed to eliminate the population as rapidly as possible. A common practice is to monitor the cells…
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…
Control systems should enforce a desired property for both expected modeled situations as well as unexpected unmodeled environmental situations. Existing methods focus on designing controllers to enforce the desired property only when the…
A major contribution to the onset and development of autoimmune disease is known to come from infections. An important practical problem is identifying the precise mechanism by which the breakdown of immune tolerance as a result of immune…
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…
Clinical studies have indicated that in malignant surveillances fluctuations in the population of certain effector T-cell repertoire become suppressed. Motivated by such observations and in an attempt to quantify adaptive human response to…
Cellular decision-making based on information received from the external environment is frequently initiated by transmembrane receptors. These receptors are known to propagate such information by triggering a series of irreversible,…
The diversity of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires is achieved by a combination of two intrinsically stochastic steps: random receptor generation by VDJ recombination, and selection based on the recognition of random self-peptides presented…
In this paper, adapted from the author's PhD thesis, we present otherwise unpublished results relating to global control schemes, culminating in the calculation of a fault-tolerant threshold for one such scheme. As with early fault-tolerant…
We present a spatial hybrid discrete-continuum modelling framework for the interaction dynamics between tumour cells and cytotoxic T cells, which play a pivotal role in the immune response against tumours. In this framework, tumour cells…
Biological and artificial networks routinely make reliable distinctions between similar inputs, and the rules for making these distinctions are learned. In some ways, self/nonself discrimination in the immune system is similar, being both…
The adaptive immune system relies on diversity of its repertoire of receptors to protect the organism from a great variety of pathogens. Since the initial repertoire is the result of random gene rearrangement, binding of receptors is not…
We consider the mutual interactions, via cytokine exchanges, among helper lymphocytes, B lymphocytes and killer lymphocytes, and we model them as a unique system by means of a tripartite network. Each part includes all the different clones…
An important parameter in the study of population evolution is $\theta=4N\nu$, where $N$ is the effective population size and $\nu$ is the rate of mutation per locus per generation. Therefore, $\theta$ represents the mean number of…
Clonal structure of the human peripheral T-cell repertoire is shaped by a number of homeostatic mechanisms, including antigen presentation, cytokine and cell regulation. Its accurate tuning leads to a remarkable ability to combat pathogens…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…