Related papers: A Minimal Framework for Optimizing Vaccination Pro…
The immune system is a real-time example of an evolving system that navigates the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. How this system responds to disease and vaccination is discussed. Of particular focus is the case…
A new detailed mathematical model for dynamics of immune response to hepatitis B is proposed, which takes into account contributions from innate and adaptive immune responses, as well as cytokines. Stability analysis of different steady…
Incorporating social factors into disease prevention and control efforts is an important undertaking of behavioral epidemiology. The interplay between disease transmission and human health behaviors, such as vaccine uptake, results in…
Probabilistic modeling is fundamental to the statistical analysis of complex data. In addition to forming a coherent description of the data-generating process, probabilistic models enable parameter inference about given data sets. This…
Infection can spread easily on networks with heterogeneous degree distribution. Here, we considered targeted immunization on such networks, wherein a fraction of individuals with the highest connectivity are immunized. To quantify the…
The human body is able to generate a diverse set of high affinity antibodies, the soluble form of B cell receptors (BCRs), that bind to and neutralize invading pathogens. The natural development of BCRs must be understood in order to design…
Scale-free configuration models are intimately connected to power law Galton-Watson trees. It is known that contact process epidemics can propagate on these trees and therefore these networks with arbitrarily small infection rate, and this…
We propose and study a new mathematical model of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The main novelty is to consider that the antibody growth depends not only on the virus and on the antibodies concentration but also on the uninfected…
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…
This work introduces a novel epidemiological model that simultaneously considers multiple viral strains, reinfections due to waning immunity response over time and an optimal control formulation. This enables us to derive optimal mitigation…
Variations in individuals' perceptions of vaccination and decision-making processes can give rise to poor vaccination coverage. The future vaccination promotion programs will benefit from understanding this heterogeneity amongst groups…
Herd immunity is shaped not only by the infection capacity of a spreading epidemic or the contact structure of the hosting population, but also by how and under what circumstances individuals acquire immunity. Immunization strategies may…
H1N1 influenza causes substantial seasonal illness and was the subtype of the 2009 influenza pandemic. Precise measures of antigenic distance between the vaccine and circulating virus strains help researchers design influenza vaccines with…
The problem of identifying important players in a given network is of pivotal importance for viral marketing, public health management, network security and various other fields of social network analysis. In this work we find the most…
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…
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…
Conformational fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the process by which transcription factor proteins locate and bind their target site on the genome of a bacterium. Using a simple model, we show that the binding time can…
This paper investigates optimal vaccination strategies in a metapopulation epidemic model. We consider a linear cost to better capture operational considerations, such as the total number of vaccines or hospitalizations, in contrast to the…
Chronic infections of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) create a very complex co-evolutionary process, where the virus tries to escape the continuously adapting host immune system. Quantitative details of this process are largely…
Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…