The Dartmouth Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics would like
to invite you to the following session:

Time: Thursday, April 11th 2013 6 - 7:30 pm

Location: Kemeny 004

Speaker: Chris Bailey-Kellogg (Associate Professor in Computer Science
Department at Dartmouth College.)

Seminar Topic: Optimization algorithms for the design of immunotolerant 
biotherapies

Pizza will be served.

Abstract: The explosive growth of biotherapeutics is revolutionizing 
the treatment of numerous diseases.
However, a therapeutic protein may be seen as non-"self" by the human 
immune system, inducing a detrimental response.
Our goal is to develop new variants of a given therapeutic protein that 
will evade detection by the immune system while
still maintaining the desired therapeutic function. To do so, we have 
developed combinatorial optimization algorithms
that balance the two competing criteria, mapping the Pareto frontier in 
order to identify sets of mutations that make
the best trade offs between immunogenicity and function. The talk will 
introduce the problem context (no previous
biology background is required), dive into the mathematical 
formulations and algorithmic approaches, and discuss the
application of our methods by experimental collaborators.