Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On Immunotherapies And Cancer Vaccination Protocols: A Mathematical Modelling Approach, Badal Joshi, Xueying Wang, Sayanti Banerjee, Haiyan Y. Tian, Anastasios Matzavinos, Mark A.J. Chaplain

Faculty Publications

In this paper we develop a new mathematical model of immunotherapy and cancer vaccination, focusing on the role of antigen presentation and co-stimulatory signaling pathways in cancer immunology. We investigate the effect of different cancer vaccination protocols on the well-documented phenomena of cancer dormancy and recurrence, and we provide a possible explanation of why adoptive (i.e. passive) immunotherapy protocols can sometimes actually promote tumour growth instead of inhibiting it (a phenomenon called immunostimulation), as opposed to active vaccination protocols based on tumour-antigen pulsed dendritic cells. Significantly, the results of our computational simulations suggest that elevated numbers of professional antigen presenting …