SMB MathEpiOnco 2024

Marisa Eisenberg, University of Michigan

Title: Identifiability and interventions: exploring when uncertainty matters
Identifiability, estimability, and parameter reduction methods provide tools to understand the interactions between parameters, model structure, and outputs—and how these interactions determine what inferences and predictions are possible for a given system. In particular, issues of identifiability and uncertainty can affect whether it is possible to select an optimal intervention—an important question for both cancer and infectious disease modeling. In this talk, we will explore how identifiability can be used in practice to help inform decision-making, and when intervention strategies are or are not robust to uncertainty in the model parameters and structure.

Claudia Pio Ferreira, São Paulo State University

Title: The impact of eggs quiescence on the efficiency of Wolbachia-carrying mosquito release to control arbovirus transmission
An ordinary differential model is proposed to understand the role of egg quiescence on the efficiency of releasing Wolbachia-carrying mosquito to control arbovirus transmission. The model has four steady states, the persistence of the uninfected population and the extinction of the infected one, the persistence of the infected population and the extinction of the uninfected one, the extinction of both populations, and the persistence of both populations. Their stability is given by four thresholds; two of them are the fitness of uninfected and infected populations when isolated, and the other two are the relative fitness when they are competing. Bifurcation diagrams, phase, and parameter spaces are shaped by the sex ratio that can be manipulated by the Wolbachia symbiont. A sensitive analysis shows that the uninfected population always maximizes its fitness according to the environmental conditions throughout the modification of the quiescence rate. Because Wolbachia- infected eggs do not survive quiescence or adults emerging from it are infer- tile, the risk of arbovirus transmission increases during or after environmental stress. This can jeopardize the use of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to control arbovirus transmissions in regions where quiescence occurs at a high rate.

Natalia Komarova, University of California, San Diego

Title: Mathematical methods in evolution and medicine
Evolutionary dynamics permeates life and life-like systems. Mathematical methods can be used to study evolutionary processes, such as selection, mutation, and drift, and to make sense of many phenomena in the life sciences. How likely is a single mutant to take over a population of individuals? What is the speed of evolution, if things have to get worse before they can get better (aka, fitness valley crossing)? Can cooperation, hierarchical relationships between individuals, spatial interactions, or randomness influence the speed or direction of evolution? Applications to biomedicine will be discussed.

Hannah Dueck, NIH

Panelist

Zhilan Feng, Purdue University and NSF

Panelist

Ami Radunskaya, Pomona College

Panelist