Title
An Agent Based Modeling Approach For The Analysis Of Tuberculosis - Immune System Dynamics
Abstract
Tuberculosis is one of the world's deadliest diseases that infects one third of the world's population, mostly in developing countries. However, tuberculosis is becoming again very dangerous also for developed countries, due to the increased mobility of the world population, and the appearance of several new bacterial strains that are multi-drug resistant. With the aim to help in finding new therapeutic interventions against tuberculosis, we present the application of a computational modeling infrastructure named UISS (Universal Immune System Simulator) able to simulate the main features and dynamics of the immune system activities. We show a further development of UISS to consider the underlying tuberculosis pathogenesis and its interaction with the host immune system. Even though the model can be further personalized employing immunological parameters and genetic information, based on the available data, we obtained simulation scenarios able to reproduce persistent latent infection or the development of active disease. In particular, UISS is able to simulate those mechanisms in which M. tuberculosis is involved in the early influx of alveolar macrophages and recruited neutrophils until the formation of the tuberculous granuloma, at both cellular and molecular levels.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/BIBM.2018.8621355
PROCEEDINGS 2018 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON BIOINFORMATICS AND BIOMEDICINE (BIBM)
Keywords
Field
DocType
artificial immune system, immune modeling, tuberculosis, therapeutic strategies
Population,Artificial immune system,Disease,Computer science,Immune system,Computational biology,Bioinformatics,Tuberculosis
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2156-1125
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
F. Pappalardo17620.14
Giulia Russo21510.89
Marzio Pennisi310923.03
Giuseppe Sgroi413.09
Giuseppe Alessandro500.34
Parasiliti Palumbo600.34
Santo Motta720229.74
Epifanio Fichera861.69