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Modeling Human Immune Response To The Lyme Disease-Causing Bacteria, Yevhen Rutovytskyy
Modeling Human Immune Response To The Lyme Disease-Causing Bacteria, Yevhen Rutovytskyy
Honors Scholar Theses
The purpose of this project is to develop and analyze a mathematical model for the pathogen-host interaction that occurs during early Lyme disease.
Based on the known biophysics of motility of Borrelia burgdorferi and a simple model for the immune response, a PDE model was created which tracks the time evolution of the concentrations of bacteria and activated immune cells in the dermis. We assume that a tick bite inoculates a highly localized population of bacteria into the dermis. These bacteria can multiply and migrate. The diffusive nature of the migration is assumed and modeled using the heat equation. Bacteria …