The European Union has set ambitious targets for recycling and landfill disposal of urban waste by 2025 and 2035, respectively. Composting is considered one way to achieve these goals. This paper focuses on a case study of a compost industrial treatment facility to identify potential and economically feasible improvements for the process and the factory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral components that interact with each other to evolve a complex, and, in some cases, unexpected behavior, represents one of the main and fascinating features of the mammalian immune system. Agent-based modeling and cellular automata belong to a class of discrete mathematical approaches in which entities (agents) sense local information and undertake actions over time according to predefined rules. The strength of this approach is characterized by the appearance of a global behavior that emerges from interactions among agents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomed Res Int
September 2013
Cancer vaccines are a real application of the extensive knowledge of immunology to the field of oncology. Tumors are dynamic complex systems in which several entities, events, and conditions interact among them resulting in growth, invasion, and metastases. The immune system includes many cells and molecules that cooperatively act to protect the host organism from foreign agents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe definition of artificial immunity, realized through vaccinations, is nowadays a practice widely developed in order to eliminate cancer disease. The present paper deals with an improved version of a mathematical model recently analyzed and related to the competition between immune system cells and mammary carcinoma cells under the action of a vaccine (Triplex). The model describes in detail both the humoral and cellular response of the immune system to the tumor associate antigen and the recognition process between B cells, T cells and antigen presenting cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Med Inform Decis Mak
November 2012
Background: Immunological strategies that achieve the prevention of tumor growth are based on the presumption that the immune system, if triggered before tumor onset, could be able to defend from specific cancers. In supporting this assertion, in the last decade active immunization approaches prevented some virus-related cancers in humans. An immunopreventive cell vaccine for the non-virus-related human breast cancer has been recently developed.
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