2020/01/01 by Lauren R. Dickman, Evan Milliken, Yang Kuang · 1 citation
Immunology and Microbiology · Mathematics · #Immunotherapy and Immune Responses #Mathematical Biology Tumor Growth #T-cell and B-cell Immunology
paper · doi:10.1137/19m1276303
crossref issued 2020/01/01 · crossref published 2020/01/01 · crossref published-print 2020/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2020/01/01 · crossref published-online 2020/04/14 · crossref created 2020/04/14 · crossref deposited 2020/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/08/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is regularly treated by surgery in conjunction with a targeted therapy or immunotherapy. Dendritic cell therapy is an immunotherapy that capitalizes on the critical role dendritic cells play in shaping the immune response. We formulate a mathematical model employing ordinary differential and delay differential equations to understand the effectiveness of dendritic cell vaccines, accounting for cell trafficking with a blood and tumor compartment. We reduce our model to a system of ordinary differential equations. Both models are validated using experimental data from melanoma-induced mice. The simplicity of our reduced model allows for mathematical analysis and admits rich dynamics observed in a clinical setting, such as periodic solutions and bistability. We give thresholds for tumor elimination and existence. Bistability, in which the model outcomes are sensitive to the initial conditions, emphasizes a need for more aggressive treatment strategies, since the reproduction number below unity is no longer sufficient for elimination. A sensitivity analysis exhibits the parameters most significantly impacting the reproduction number, thereby suggesting the most efficacious treatments to use together with a dendritic cell vaccine.