The Value of Inflammatory Signals in Adaptive Immune Responses

Cells of the immune system must search among billions of healthy cells in order to find and neutralize a small number of infected cells before pathogens replicate to sufficient numbers to cause disease or death. The immune system uses information signals to accomplish this search quickly. Here we use a computationally tractable and scalable differential equation model and a spatially explicit agent based model to determine how much the information in capillary inflammation decreases the time taken by the first CTL to find infected cells, increases the number of CTLs by day 5 post activation in infected tissue and decreases the number of infected cells at day 5. We find that the inflammation signal localized in a small region of infected tissue significantly reduces search times. We suggest that simple models of infection and immune response can reveal the role of local information signals in improving