Speaker
Description
When cancer develops, the cells can present unique proteins called neoantigens. A promising immunotherapy technique uses neoantigen cancer vaccines to activate T-cells to attack tumor cells which present these neoantigens. In this project, we model neoantigen cancer vaccine treatment of a primary tumor and the resulting effects on metastatic emission. We use a system of ordinary differential equations to model the treatment of the primary tumor, and couple the system with a partial differential equation that tracks the number of metastases per time and size. Vaccine dosage is taken as a control in the ODE system to decrease the primary tumor burden and in turn, slow the spread of metastases. An optimal control problem is formulated to design vaccine treatment. Numerical simulations of the model and the optimal control will be presented as well.
