The Role of the Innate Immune System in Oncolytic Virotherapy

Abstract

The complexity of the immune responses is a major challenge in current virotherapy. This study incorporates the innate immune response into our basic model for virotherapy and investigates how the innate immunity affects the outcome of virotherapy. The viral therapeutic dynamics is largely determined by the viral burst size, relative innate immune killing rate, and relative innate immunity decay rate. The innate immunity may complicate virotherapy in the way of creating more equilibria when the viral burst size is not too big, while the dynamics is similar to the system without innate immunity when the viral burst size is big.