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.