Abstract
Recent advances in the field of regulatory T cells reveal that these cells play a vital role during immunotherapy. For example, a higher ratio between regulatory T cells and effector T cells within tumor tissue is associated with worse prognoses in many cancers, including ovarian cancer (Leffers et al., 2009), lung cancer (Tao et al., 2012), glioblastoma (Sayour et al., 2015). On the other hand, the tug of war between regulatory T cells and effector T cells for interleukin-2 may chisel the immune response against cancer. In this work, we study a mathematical model that investigates the role of regulatory T cells during immunotherapy. We demonstrate mathematically, for the first time, that the initial ratio between regulatory T cells and effector T cells does impact the tumor recurrence time. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of utilization of IL-2 may flip the outcome of immunotherapy, providing further evidence that it may be clinically viable to modulate the consumption of IL-2 by Tregs. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
