Related papers: Sequence Space Localization in the Immune System R…
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…
The response of the immune system to different vaccination patterns is studied with a simple model. It is argued that the history and characteristics of the pattern defines very different secondary immune responses in the case of infection.…
The immune system normally protects the human host against death by infection. However, when an immune response is mistakenly directed at self antigens, autoimmune disease can occur. We describe a model of protein evolution to simulate the…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
How does immune system evolve functional proteins - potent antibodies - in such a short time? We address this question using a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of humoral immune response with explicitly defined interactions…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
When the body gets infected by a pathogen or receives a vaccine dose, the immune system develops pathogen-specific immunity. Induced immunity decays in time and years after recovery/vaccination the host might become susceptible again.…
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 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…
RNA-based vaccination has been broadly applied in the COVID pandemic. A characteristic of the immunization was fast waning immunity. However, the time scale of this process varied considerable for virus subtypes and among individuals.…
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…
One important feature of the mammalian immune system is the highly specific binding of antigens to antibodies. Antibodies generated in response to one infection may also provide some level of cross immunity to other infections. One model to…
The propagation of model epidemics on a small-world network under the action of immunization is studied. Although the connectivity in this kind of networks is rather uniform, a vaccination strategy focused on the best connected individuals…
Immunological systems have been an abundant inspiration to contemporary computer scientists. Problem solving strategies, stemming from known immune system phenomena, have been successfully applied to challenging problems of modern computing…
The evolutionary dynamics of human Influenza A virus presents a challenging theoretical problem. An extremely high mutation rate allows the virus to escape, at each epidemic season, the host immune protection elicited by previous…
Divergence in antigen response of the immune network is discussed, based on shape-space modelling. The present model extends the shape-space model by introducing the evolution of specificity of idiotypes. When the amount of external antigen…
Understanding the dynamics of antibody levels is crucial for characterizing the time-dependent response to immune events: either infections or vaccinations. The sequence and timing of these events significantly influence antibody level…
The vertebrate immune system is a wonder of modern evolution. Occasionally, however, correlations within the immune system lead to inappropriate recruitment of preexisting T cells against novel viral diseases. We present a random energy…
We consider the interplay of vaccination and migration rates on disease persistence in epidemiological systems. We show that short-term and long-term migration can inhibit disease persistence. As a result, we show how migration changes how…
We examine here the effects of recurrent vaccination and waning immunity on the establishment of an endemic equilibrium in a population. An individual-based model that incorporates memory effects for transmission rate during infection and…