Modelling the suppression of autoimmunity pathogen caused proliferation of T cells

Abstract

We study a mathematical model of immune response by T cells where the
regulatory T cells (Treg) inhibit interleukine 2 secretion.
We model the suppression of the autoimmune line of T cells after a different line of T cells was stimulated by the presence of a pathogen. The exposure
to a pathogen results in an increased proliferation rate of the bystander
T cells. If the population of the pathogen responding line of T cells becomes large enough, for a sufficiently long time period, it may be able to deplete the concentration of autoimmune T cells. As a consequence, autoimmunity can be suppressed.

This work is financed by the Project "NanoSTIMA: Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing: Towards Integrated Multimodal Health Monitoring and Analytics/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016" is financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).