Immune response to a variable pathogen: a stochastic model with two interlocked Darwinian entities.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the modeling of a host immune system, more precisely the immune effector cell and immune memory cell population, and its interaction with an invading pathogen population. It will tackle two issues of interest; on the one hand, in defining a stochastic model accounting for the inherent nature of organisms in population dynamics, namely multiplication with mutation and selection; on the other hand, in providing a description of pathogens that may vary their antigens through mutations during infection of the host. Unlike most of the literature, which models the dynamics with first-order differential equations, this paper proposes a Galton-Watson type branching process to describe stochastically by whole distributions the population dynamics of pathogens and immune cells. I

SUBMITTER: Kuhn C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3574756 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature