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Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator
BACKGROUND: Immunological prevention of cancer has been obtained in HER-2/neu transgenic mice using a vaccine that combines 3 different immune stimuli (Triplex vaccine) that is repeatedly administered for the entire lifespan of the host (Chronic protocol). Biological experiments leave open the quest...
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Formato: | Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2006
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1557867/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16857043 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-7-352 |
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author | Lollini, Pier-Luigi Motta, Santo Pappalardo, Francesco |
author_facet | Lollini, Pier-Luigi Motta, Santo Pappalardo, Francesco |
author_sort | Lollini, Pier-Luigi |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Immunological prevention of cancer has been obtained in HER-2/neu transgenic mice using a vaccine that combines 3 different immune stimuli (Triplex vaccine) that is repeatedly administered for the entire lifespan of the host (Chronic protocol). Biological experiments leave open the question of whether the Chronic protocol is indeed the minimal vaccination schedule affording 100% protection, or whether shorter protocols could be applied that would result in the same efficacy. A biological solution would require an enormous number of experiments, each lasting at least one year. Therefore we approached this problem by developing a simulator (SimTriplex) which describes the immune response activated by Triplex vaccine. This simulator, tested against in vivo experiments on HER-2/neu mice, reproduces all the vaccination protocols used in the in vivo experiments. The simulator should describe any vaccination protocol within the tested range. A possible solution to the former open question using a minimal search strategy based on a genetic algorithm is presented. This is the first step toward a more general approach of biological or clinical constraints for the search of an effective vaccination schedule. RESULTS: The results suggest that the Chronic protocol included a good number of redundant vaccine administrations, and that maximal protection could still be obtained with a number of vaccinations ~40% less than with the Chronic protocol. CONCLUSION: This approach may have important connotations with regard to translation of cancer immunopreventive approaches to human situations, in which it is desirable to minimize the number of vaccinations. We are currently setting up experiments in mice to test whether the actual effectiveness of the vaccination protocol agrees with the genetic algorithm. |
format | Text |
id | pubmed-1557867 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2006 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-15578672006-09-02 Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator Lollini, Pier-Luigi Motta, Santo Pappalardo, Francesco BMC Bioinformatics Methodology Article BACKGROUND: Immunological prevention of cancer has been obtained in HER-2/neu transgenic mice using a vaccine that combines 3 different immune stimuli (Triplex vaccine) that is repeatedly administered for the entire lifespan of the host (Chronic protocol). Biological experiments leave open the question of whether the Chronic protocol is indeed the minimal vaccination schedule affording 100% protection, or whether shorter protocols could be applied that would result in the same efficacy. A biological solution would require an enormous number of experiments, each lasting at least one year. Therefore we approached this problem by developing a simulator (SimTriplex) which describes the immune response activated by Triplex vaccine. This simulator, tested against in vivo experiments on HER-2/neu mice, reproduces all the vaccination protocols used in the in vivo experiments. The simulator should describe any vaccination protocol within the tested range. A possible solution to the former open question using a minimal search strategy based on a genetic algorithm is presented. This is the first step toward a more general approach of biological or clinical constraints for the search of an effective vaccination schedule. RESULTS: The results suggest that the Chronic protocol included a good number of redundant vaccine administrations, and that maximal protection could still be obtained with a number of vaccinations ~40% less than with the Chronic protocol. CONCLUSION: This approach may have important connotations with regard to translation of cancer immunopreventive approaches to human situations, in which it is desirable to minimize the number of vaccinations. We are currently setting up experiments in mice to test whether the actual effectiveness of the vaccination protocol agrees with the genetic algorithm. BioMed Central 2006-07-20 /pmc/articles/PMC1557867/ /pubmed/16857043 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-7-352 Text en Copyright © 2006 Lollini et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Methodology Article Lollini, Pier-Luigi Motta, Santo Pappalardo, Francesco Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title | Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title_full | Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title_fullStr | Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title_full_unstemmed | Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title_short | Discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
title_sort | discovery of cancer vaccination protocols with a genetic algorithm driving an agent based simulator |
topic | Methodology Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1557867/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16857043 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-7-352 |
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