In 2015 my daughter was diagnosed with a life threatening dairy allergy just after her 1st birthday. Our world changed overnight and my fear for her safety consumed me. At three years of age I discovered Oral Immunotherapy (OIT), and after months of searching for the right doctor and then 9 months of actual treatment, she was desensitized. It was a miracle for our family. Today she can attend school and other events with no special precautions or restrictions. This treatment changed my daughters life.
This became the inspiration for my next research project. Using a series of differential equations, I attempted to model the atopic body’s reaction to continued “treatment” of low doses of the allergen. The following is the model that I have thus far. I am still in the early stages of this research and this model has not been reviewed or published to date. I will continue to refine the model using Latin Hypercube sampling. All in hopes we can better understand the dynamics of allergies and immunotherapy and its role in the body’s healing processes.
This research has been presented at the MAA Mathfest where it was awarded Outstanding Undergraduate Presentation. I have also presented this at the Joint Mathematics Meetings and have given a short talk on this at Techlohoma’s Big Data Meetup, you can access that video here.
Kelley France 