Related papers: A Minimal Framework for Optimizing Vaccination Pro…
Therapeutic strategies to correct an excessive immune response to pathogenic infection is investigated as an optimal control problem. The control problem is formulated around a four dimensional mathematical model describing the inflammatory…
The unfolding of pandemic influenza A(H1N1) for Fall 2009 in the Northern Hemisphere is still uncertain. Plans for vaccination campaigns and vaccine trials are underway, with the first batches expected to be available early October. Several…
The human immune system depends on a highly diverse collection of antibody-making B cells. B cell receptor sequence diversity is generated by a random recombination process called "rearrangement" forming progenitor B cells, then a Darwinian…
B cells and the antibodies they produce are vital to health and survival, motivating research on the details of the mutational and evolutionary processes in the germinal centers (GC) from which mature B cells arise. It is known that B cells…
How to strategically allocate the available vaccines is a crucial issue for pandemic control. In this work, we propose a mathematical framework for optimal stabilizing vaccine allocation, where our goal is to send the infections to zero as…
Infectious diseases pose major public health challenges to society, highlighting the importance of designing effective policies to reduce economic loss and mortality. In this paper, we propose a framework for sequential decision-making…
Estimates of national immunization coverage are crucial for guiding policy and decision-making in national immunization programs and setting the global immunization agenda. WHO and UNICEF estimates of national immunization coverage (WUENIC)…
Millions of young people are not immunized in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries because of low vaccine availability resulting from inefficiencies in cold supply chains. We create supply chain network design and distribution models to…
In order to meet regulatory approval, pharmaceutical companies often must demonstrate that new vaccines reduce the total risk of a post-infection outcome like transmission, symptomatic disease, severe illness, or death in randomized,…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
For over a century, immunology has masterfully discovered and dissected the components of our immune system, yet its collective behavior remains fundamentally unpredictable. In this perspective, we argue that building on the learnings of…
We analyse a minimal model for the primary response in the adaptive immune system comprising three different players: antigens, T and B cells. We assume B-T interactions to be diluted and sampled locally from heterogeneous degree…
How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting…
We are frequently faced with a large collection of antibodies, and want to select those with highest affinity for their cognate antigen. When developing a first-line therapeutic for a novel pathogen, for instance, we might look for such…
Hepatitis type B is one of the most common infectious disease worldwide that can pose severe threats to human health up to the point that may contribute to severe liver damage or cancer. Over the past two decades a large number of dynamic…
The spreading of infectious diseases with and without immunization of individuals can be modeled by stochastic processes that exhibit a transition between an active phase of epidemic spreading and an absorbing phase, where the disease dies…
Vaccination has been proven to be the most effective method to prevent infectious diseases. However, there are still millions of children in low and middle-income countries who are not covered by routine vaccines and remain at risk. The…
We consider the simple epidemiological SIS model for a general heterogeneous population introduced by Lajmanovich and Yorke (1976) in finite dimension, and its infinite dimensional generalization we introduced in previous works. In this…
We introduce a novel, multi-scale model for affinity maturation, which aims to capture the intra-clonal, inter-clonal and epitope-specific organization of the B cell population in a germinal center. We describe the evolution of the B cell…
Understanding waning of vaccine-induced protection is important for both immunology and public health. Population heterogeneities in underlying (pre-vaccination) susceptibility and vaccine response can cause measured vaccine effectiveness…