Scientists from Sechenov University, the Institute of Computational Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the company "SimurgPharm" have built a mathematical model of B-cell immune response. As reported to "Izvestia" by the university's press service, the system of 20 ordinary differential equations describes the entire path of B-lymphocytes – from birth in the bone marrow to migration into tissues and transformation into plasma cells that produce antibodies.
The model identified two critical factors determining the strength of the immune response: the primary contact of a naive B-cell with an antigen and the state of the bone marrow microenvironment. Based on this data, developers can run virtual experiments, predicting why the same drug has a strong effect in some patients and almost no effect in others.
Kirill Peskov, head of the mathematical modeling center, explained to the publication that the model helps to explain the variability of the immune response and take it into account already at the stage of planning clinical trials.
The solution belongs to the class of quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and has already been published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology. It can be supplemented with new diseases and drug mechanisms of action, which in the future will reduce the time and cost of developing drugs against rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and multiple sclerosis.
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