bezier control points method to solve scheduling of injections of immunotherapeutic agents贝塞尔曲线控制点方法解决调度注射免疫治疗药物.pdfVIP

Intelligent Control and Automation, 2012, 3, 20-25 /10.4236/ica.2012.31003 Published Online February 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ica) Bezier Control Points Method to Solve Scheduling of Injections of Immunotherapeutic Agents Fateme Ghomanjani Department of Applied Mathematics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran Email: fatemeghomanjani@ Received October 25, 2011; revised November 25, 2011; accepted December 3, 2011 ABSTRACT Cancer immunotherapy aims at enhancing immune system to defend against the tumor. However, it is associated with injecting small doses of tumor-bearing molecules or even using drugs. The problem is that how to schedule these injec- tions effectively and/or how to apply drugs in a way to decrease toxic side effects of drugs such that the tumor growth to be stopped or at least to be limited. Here, the theory of optimal control has been applied to find the optimal schedule of injections of an immunotherapeutic agent against cancer. The numerical method employed works for any dynamic linear system and has almost precise solution. In this work, it was tested for a well known model of the tumor immune system interaction. Keywords: Immunotherapy; Bezier Control Points; Constrained Optimal Control 1. Introduction tolerated by the patient’s own immune system since the tumor cells are essentially the patient’s own cells that are In the field of mathematical biology it is possible to de- growing, dividing and spreading without proper regula- scribe certain phenomena by mathematical models and