Modelling the evolution of B cell responses to vaccination

Rituparna Banerjee

University of British Columbia

"Modelling the evolution of B cell responses to vaccination"

Vaccinations have historically proven to be an effective means of conferring immunity in case of various diseases by enhancing the body’s preparedness for future infection events. The success of a vaccination program depends on various factors like dose composition and time gap between vaccinations. To produce an effective response, the immune system relies heavily on B cells, among other immune cells, as these cells mature to produce antibodies. In this presentation I will present a simplified mechanistic model of B cell evolution (mutation and selection) during the immune response to vaccination, which explicitly includes the germinal centre and extrafollicular pathways. We apply our model to build an understanding of how these pathways might work together to generate a signature in the evolutionary history of B cell clonal families within a single person, considering different possible vaccination systems (homologous and heterologous). We also plan on comparing phylogenetic trees generated by our model with real trees obtained from longitudinal studies.

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