Modeling and Control of Complex Immune Responses
Optimizing therapeutic treatment for the critically ill patient is a challenging problem that clinicians face. The complexity of an immune response makes it extremely difficult to predict the effects of a given therapeutic intervention and determine the next best course of action. There is, therefore, a pressing need to develop assistive tools that can complement the expertise of the clinician and help formulate successful intervention strategies. This is an exciting time to be working on such interdisciplinary problems since there is an increase in the awareness in the medical community about the potential benefit of such tools and in the amount of data and information available.
The main proposal goal is to develop new methodologies for adequately controlling the inflammatory response, a complex cascade of events that has been typically modeled by highly nonlinear systems of differential equations. We propose to modify and develop new mathematical theory underlying engineering control methods that will apply to a wide class of nonlinear systems. These developments will fill an important gap in these fields and will be used to solve central problems related to regulation of complex immunological systems. The PIs plan to develop estimation and adaptive control techniques to tune the proposed models as more data is collected, and as a result, obtain better control performance. The nonlinearities of the systems that will be considered, as well as the nature of the application settings, will require an expansion of the available theories and methods, making the proposed project different from existing effort.
The new techniques developed will be applicable to a broader spectrum of nonlinear models for which existing methods are inadequate and for a variety of other applications than those proposed to be explored. The proposed research is also an inherently interdisciplinary venture that will integrate mathematical modeling with engineering principles in the context of a medical application area. The proposed research include the involvement graduate students from mathematics and engineering in this work in order to expose them to research of this nature. This will provide these students a unique learning opportunity to work within an interdisciplinary setting and gain experience in effectively talking across disciplines, a valuable skill to acquire as research endeavors become increasingly interdisciplinary. Further, the development of a graduate course based this work is planned, which will help further NSF’s goals to use research to enhance educational efforts.