Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-21-2009

Department

Mathematics

School

Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Abstract

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 cells correlate well with prolonged time periods of cancer dormancy. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Comments

© 2009. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publication Title

Journal of Theoretical Biology

Volume

259

Issue

4

First Page

820

Last Page

827

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