A Simulation of the Humoral Immune System

Abstract

The idea of theoretically describing the immune system has become popular in the past decade, and in fact the existence of the present volume is evidence for the emergence of the field. With the advent of modern high-speed computers it no longer seems impossible to model and simulate the behavior of the immune system. Previous attempts at modeling the immune system have generally followed the course of focussing on a phenomenon or class of phenomena, writing down the differential equations for these phenomena and then trying to obtain solutions (Perelson 1988, 1990). This approach has led to better understanding of the phenomena and how they might be applied to the immune system, but often the mathematical approximations required to obtain solutions have removed much of the connection with the actual biological system, or at least made the connections much more opaque.