Modelling the Evolution of the Immune Response to Cancer
The immune response to cancer causes stimulation and inhibition of the growing malignancy. A part of the tumour microenivronment, the immune response evolves over time as a function of disease progression. Naive immune cells recruited to the tumour microenvironment will sense the local cytokine signals and polarize into either tumour-promoting or tumour-inhibiting immune cell types. These cells then contribute to the signalling milieu evolving the immunological profile. This talk will discuss a mathematical model to capture the evolutionary dynamics of the immune response to cancer. We explore the role of noise and the evolution of the immune response polarization (from a primarily anti-tumour response when the tumour is new, to a primarily pro-tumour response when the tumour is old). We use stochastic DEs to allow us to explore variability in our model results.