A Hybrid Agent Based and Differential Equation Model of Body Size Effects on Pathogen Replication and Immune System Response

TL;DR

This study combines agent-based and differential equation models to explore how host body size influences pathogen replication and immune response, revealing size-dependent pathogen dynamics and invariant immune response rates across species.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid modeling approach that integrates ABM and ODE models to analyze immune response scaling with host body size.

Findings

Pathogen replication rates decrease with host size.

Immune system response times are invariant across host sizes.

The hybrid model balances detail and computational efficiency.

Abstract

Many emerging pathogens infect multiple host species, and multi-host pathogens may have very different dynamics in different host species. This research addresses how pathogen replication rates and Immune System (IS) response times are constrained by host body size. An Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) model is used to show that pathogen replication rates decline with host body size but IS response rates remain invariant with body size. An Agent-Based Model (ABM) is used to investigate two models of IS architecture that could explain scale invariance of IS response rates. A stage structured hybrid model is proposed that strikes a balance between the detailed representation of an ABM and computational tractability of an ODE, by using them in the initial and latter stages of an infection, respectively.