RUDN University professor spoke at a workshop on mathematical modeling in biology and medicine in Italy

Professor Volpert spoke on the topic “Mathematical modeling of respiratory viral infections”.

“The report is devoted to recent work on mathematical modeling of viral infections from the point of view of their spread through cell culture and body tissues. It has been shown that the infection spreads in cell culture as a reaction-diffusion wave, for which the spread rate and viral load can be determined both analytically and numerically,” Vitaly Volpert, Director of the Interdisciplinary Scientific Center for Mathematical Modeling in Biomedicine, RUDN.

Professor Wolpert studied the competition of two variants of the virus in the same cell culture and showed that the variant with a higher individual wave speed outperforms the other and destroys it. This approach is applied to the Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 infection in human epithelial and lung cell cultures, allowing the infectivity and virulence of each variant to be characterized and compared.

Other presentations include:

• Adelia Sequeira (Portugal) reviewed mathematical models and methods for studying blood flow in blood vessels;
• Raluk Eftimie (France) studied the influence of the immune response on the growth of a cancerous tumor. Particular attention has been paid to the role of different types of macrophages;
• Malay Banerjee and Samiran Ghosh (India) spoke about the mathematical modeling of epidemics in the application to COVID-19. They introduced a new class of distributed or point delay models;
• Leon Tinet (France) discussed the influence of inflammation on the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

At the workshop, the Beltrami Prize was awarded for outstanding achievements in scientific, pedagogical and organizational work. The winners were Honorary Doctor of RUDN University Willy Jaeger from Germany and Luigi Preziosi from Italy. Willy Jaeger gave an overview report on COVID-19. Luigi Preziosi’s lecture was devoted to the influence of mechanical stresses on the behavior of biological cells.