Organizers:
Terry Easlick (Univeristé de Montréal/Centre de recherche Azrieli du CHU Sainte-Justine), Morgan Craig, Univeristé de Montréal/Centre de recherche Azrieli du CHU Sainte-Justine
Description:
This session will bring together leading researchers to discuss innovative mathematical modelling approaches for studying immune responses to infectious diseases for the establishment of robust vaccination strategies. The objective is to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, showcasing novel methods and their application to key areas such as antigen-specific responses, humoral and cell-mediated immunity, vaccine dose optimization, and addressing challenges posed by waning immunity and pathogen diversity. This minisymposium will present complementary approaches to studying within-host immune responses to infections and vaccines. Topics will include capturing population-level dynamics, accounting for biological variability using stochastic models, simulating cell-to-cell interactions using agent-based models (ABMs), and extracting complex patterns from large immunological datasets using machine learning techniques. In particular, we will highlight how individual-level diversity (i.e., sex, age, comorbidities, genetics, etc.) affect immune and vaccine responses. By bridging diverse perspectives and methodologies, this minisymposium will contribute to innovation in model-informed vaccine development by promoting cutting-edge approaches to mathematical immunology that advance our fundamental understanding of individual immunity to bring necessary improvements to the vaccine development pipeline.
Mélanie Prague
Université de Bordeaux/INRIA"Mechanistic Model of initial and persisting antibody response following Ebola vaccination: application to the PREVAC trial."
Elizabeth Amona
Virginia Commonwealth University"Studying Disease Reinfection Rates, Vaccine Efficacy and the Timing of Vaccine Rollout in the context of Infectious Diseases"
Cailan Jeynes-Smith
University of Tennessee Health Science Centre"Dissecting Cytokine Production: Integrating Subset-Specific Data into Immunological Models"
Jonah Hall
University of British Columbia/BC Children's Hospital Research Institute"Optimization of Pertussis Immunization Using Mathematical Modeling"
