Fine-tuning anti-tumor immunotherapies via stochastic simulations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Anti-tumor therapies aim at reducing to zero the number of tumor cells in a host within their end or, at least, aim at leaving the patient with a sufficiently small number of tumor cells so that the residual tumor can be eradicated by the immune system. Besides severe side-effects, a key problem of such therapies is finding a suitable scheduling of their administration to the patients. In this paper we study the effect of varying therapy-related parameters on the final outcome of the interplay between a tumor and the immune system.

Results

This work generalizes our previous study on hybrid models of such an interplay where interleukins are modeled as a continuous variable, and the tumor and the immune system as a discrete-state continuous-time stochastic process.

SUBMITTER: Caravagna G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3303725 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature