A clonal selection based timecourse model for antibody responses to killed vaccine, with applications to foot and mouth disease.

Published models for the timecourse of the immune response are reviewed for their applicability to data from animals that have been injected with killed vaccine. Simple models are required so that statistical fitting procedures become straightforward. A class of models that incorporates the concept of clonal selection has been found useful. Immune memory is described in terms of persistence of mean antibody affinity when the overall concentration of antibody has declined towards background. The model is demonstrated on multipoint affinity distributions and initial negative exponential densities, from which conditions for boundedness can be developed. Predictions are made that are consistent with experiments on the evolution of immunoassay data using foot and mouth disease vaccine.