Why did Helios Biosciences choose the T-lymphocyte response to bring its dynamic modeling proof of principle?
The T-lymphocyte paradigm is one of the best to establish a robust proof of principle, because of its very high complexity. If a modeling method works for T-Lymphocytes there are few doubts that it will perform well when applied to other biological questions. It is also a paradigm that is relevant to human clinics, because it explores crucial issues with regard to inflammation, allergy, auto-immunity and graft tolerance. Last, the existence of already validated drug targets in this paradigm provided us with benchmark data to validate our method. Complexity of the T-lymphocyte response: the response of T-cells to the presentation of an antigen includes either cell proliferation and terminal differentiation or cell death depending on the antigenic context and time after presentation. It is thus a highest complexity response, sustained by dynamic changes in the intermixed signal transduction pathways of cell differentiation (including specificity of lymphokine synthesis), cell cycle and a
