Faculty Bibliography

PLAN C, an Agent-Based Model platform for urban disaster simulation and emergency planning, features a variety of reality-based agents interacting on a realistic city map and can simulate the complex dynamics of emergency responses in different urban catastrophe scenarios. Work reported here focuses on the incorporation of specific subpopulations of person agents, reflecting the existence of individuals with specific defining characteristics and needs, and their interactions with the available resources. Performance of these subpopulations are compared in both point-source attack and distributed disaster scenarios for disasters of different magnitudes. Specific ""recovery points"" can be derived both for total- and sub-populations, which estimate the duration of a response system's/city's vulnerability. The effect of varying topologies of available resources, i.e. different hospital maps, provides particular insight into the dynamics that can emerge in this complex system. PLAN C produces interesting emergent behavior which is often consistent with the literature on emergency medicine of previous events.

T cell receptor (TCR) V alpha and V beta chain usage of HTLV-I tax-specific, HLA class I restricted CD8+ cytotoxic T cells (CTL) was determined from lymphocytes obtained from peripheral blood of patients with HTLV-I associated neurological disease. To characterize TCR repertoire, CD8+ lymphocytes from peripheral blood were cloned in limiting dilution, and the resulting wells were screened for HTLV-I-specific precursor CTL activity. RNA was isolated from HLA-A2 restricted HTLV-I tax peptide-specific (tax 11-19; LLFGYPVYV) CD8+ CTL lines and cDNA was analyzed by PCR amplification using V alpha and V beta chain family-specific oligonucleotide primers. The results indicate that CD8+ cytotoxic T cell lines from HLA-A2 HAM/TSP patients express a limited repertoire of T cell receptor chains which may correlate with duration and severity of disease. The restricted use of TCR genes expressed by antigen-specific CTL may play a critical role in the pathogenesis of HAM/TSP and may be of value in developing immunotherapeutic strategies that focus on eliminating these cells or inhibiting their activity.