Invited workshop: Multi-scale modeling of immune responses

When: June 15-17, 2008

Where: location to be confirmed, Penn State's University Park campus (map)

Background

Immune responses play an important role in directing within- and between-host dynamics. Mathematical modeling has illuminated various processes involved in immune responses and in the population dynamics of pathogens and immune cells. The approaches to model immune responses involve modeling of intracellular signaling pathways, cell-cell interactions, at several different spatial scales. Can we combine the concepts at different scales of cellular complexity to model a systemic immune response? Such models will lead to better understanding of primary infections, co-infections and multiple infections by the same pathogen.

This workshop will bring together experimentalists and modelers to:

Assess the benefits and limitations of various approaches to modeling
Identify how available data can be used for modeling (keeping in mind that the strength of modeling lies in its capacity to integrate data and models, and that systematic observations required for modeling are limited)

Aims

To discuss various methods to model immune responses and to discuss types of experimental data used for modeling
To understand the technical challenges of multi-scale modeling of immune responses
To characterize the key elements involved in the immune responses to different pathogens and their regulation

Questions to stimulate discussion

Will it be useful to develop multi-scale models?
How complex can such a system become?
What are the best ways to handle this complexity?
What are the different types of data we can use in modeling? (and How?)
What insights have models already provided in the field of immunology?
How can models contribute towards understanding of the immune responses? - New predictions, integration of the data, inference, etc
What are the features of immune responses against various pathogens?
How can we use modeling to understand the features of infections in different hosts (which are not currently used as experimental model systems)?
How do immune responses affect the between-host transmission?
How are systemic and local immune responses regulated and how do they affect each other?

To add to these questions contact Juilee Thakar

A private wiki for this workshop will be set up in April that will allow speakers to contribute to these questions and to share reading material.

Confirmed speakers

Réka Albert (Penn State)
Rob de Boer (Utrecht University, NL)
Arup Chakraborty (MIT)
James Faeder (U Pittsburgh)
Ronald Germain (NIAID)
Michael Gilchrist (U Tennessee)
Eric Harvill (Penn State)
Fernand Hayot (Mount Sinai School of Medicine0
Simeone Marino (U Michigan)
Richard Randall (St Andrews, UK)
Roberto Saenz (Cambridge University, UK)
Sean Stromberg (UCSB)

General agenda

(A detailed agenda will be posted in May).

Sunday June 15

Social at 6pm

Monday June 16

Two sessions plus evening social

Tuesday June 17