Contact: Jean-Yves Le Boudec
The Immune System of vertebrates is a complex biological system that helps fight various infections and attacks. Its involves a complex interaction between the innate immune system (macrophages, complement proteins, dentritic cells and the adaptive immune system (T- and B- lymphocytes). The innate system provides the danger signals required to trigger the adaptive system, which in turn activates the innate system. The adaptive system uses a set of negative and positive selection procedures to create B- and T-cells that are efficient at turning down agressions. Sometimes however, the adaptive immune system itself is the cause of diseases. Understanding the performance aspects of the immune system is key to help in refining medical responses to diseases such as cancer, AIDS and auto-immune diseases.
The goal of this project is to help develop models and a simulator of the T-cell response. More precisely, the goal of this work is to apply fast Markov chain simulation to a stage-structured simulation model of T-cell population.
References
- D. L. Chao, M. P. Davenport, S. Forrest, and A. S. Perelson. Stochastic Stage-structured Modeling of the Adaptive Immune System. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics Conference (CSB 2003), pp 124-131. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos, California, 2003 pdf
- Steven H. Kleinstein and Philip E. Seiden, “Simulating the Immune System”, Computing in Science and Engineering, pp 69-77. July/August 2000.
- A.S. Perelson and G. Weisbuch, “Immunology for physicists”, Rev. Modern Phys., Oct. 1997
- D.J. Smith, S. Forrest and A.S. Perelson, “Immunological memory is associative”, In: International Conference on Multiagent Systems, Workshop notes: Workshop 4: Immunity Based Systems, p.62-70, Kyoto, Japan (1996).