Optimal therapeutic protocols in cancer immunotherapy.

Using one of the well known mathematical models for immunotherapy of tumor-immune interactions, in this paper an algorithm is developed to optimize the immunotherapy in cancer treatment. The optimal control strategy is defined to maximize the effector cells and interleukin-2 concentration, while minimizing the tumor cells. The performance index is developed to stop the growth of tumor cells even at the end of the treatment. The maximum principle approach is the optimal control strategy in this paper. Analyzing the results and comparing them with very recent researches, it is shown that the amount of tumor cells with the proposed control algorithm is less then the others, both during and after the completion of the treatment. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.