Other Applied Mathematics Commons^™

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 …