QLS Guest Seminar - Monday 6 June

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QUANTITATIVE LIFE SCIENCES GUEST SEMINAR

Monday, 6 June at 2:00pm

ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building

Speaker: Andrea Cavallone - University of Turin, Doctoral School in Life 
and Health Sciences, Turin, Italy

Title: " Mathematical Modeling of Human Antibody Affinity"

Abstract:

Affinity defines the attractive force between antibody (Ab) and antigen 
(Ag) and represents a key feature of strong immune response. The study 
of affinity maturation of antibodies following vaccination or infection 
is a growing field of interest for vaccine discovery. Nevertheless the 
affinity characterization of human sera is still precluded due to the 
complexity of polyclonal antibodies, being the sera a mixture of 
different Abs clones (mAb) of unknown concentration and affinity.

We developed a high-throughput methodology, based on mathematical 
modeling of the Ag-Ab capture profile in the Gyrolab^® miniaturized 
immunoassay platform, to define an affinity score and to de-convolute 
polyclonal sera in monoclonal-like sub-populations. The mAb-Ag profile 
in a hydro-dynamical system can be modeled as a Lévy processand it is 
described by an approximated Landau distribution. The estimation of 
optimal parameters from the de-convolution of non-Gaussian mixtures 
allows to measure affinity and quantity in each Ab sub-population.

This approach has been validated on four artificial mixtures, each 
composed by two fully characterized monoclonal antibodies with different 
affinity and run at different concentrations.Nevertheless, capture 
profiles from certain mixtures of mAbs elude our analysis.

The next step is to extend the approach by investigating the microscopic 
dynamics in the Gyrolab^® experimental set-up and by developing a model 
to explain all observed capture profiles in polyclonal sera.

This method can be successfully used in human sera from subject 
immunized with different vaccines tostudy the maturation of Ab affinity, 
also in relationship with other serological measurements, including 
cellular responses and correlates of protection, and therefore to select 
the best vaccine formulation.


Indico web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/7889/

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail: qls at ictp.it