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On the Dynamics of Tumor-Immune System Interactions and Combined Chemo- and Immunotherapy

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Part of the book series: SIMAI Springer Series ((SEMA SIMAI))

Abstract

Tumor-immune system interplay is extremely complex, and, as such, it represents a big challenge for mathematical oncology. Here we investigate a simple general family of models for this important interplay by considering both the delivery of a cytotoxic chemotherapy and of immunotherapy. Then methods of geometrical optimal control are applied to a special case (the Stepanova model) in order to infer (under suitable constraints) the best combination of drugs scheduling to transfer — through therapy —the system from an initial condition in the malignant region of the state space into a benign region. Our findings suggest that chemotherapy is always needed first to reduce a large tumor volume before the immune system can become effective.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under collaborative research grants DMS 1008209 and 1008221 (U.L. and H.S.), and by the EU project “p-Medicine: Personalized Medicine” (FP7-ICT-2009.5.3-270089) (A. d’O.). We also would like to thank our students Mohamad Naghnaeian and Mozhdeh Faraji for carrying out the numerical computations and making the figures used in the paper.

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Correspondence to Urszula Ledzewicz .

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d’Onofrio, A., Ledzewicz, U., Schättler, H. (2012). On the Dynamics of Tumor-Immune System Interactions and Combined Chemo- and Immunotherapy. In: d’Onofrio, A., Cerrai, P., Gandolfi, A. (eds) New Challenges for Cancer Systems Biomedicine. SIMAI Springer Series. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2571-4_13

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