Optimization of influenza vaccine strain selection

The World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for making annual vaccine strains recommendation to countries around the globe. However, various studies have found that the WHO vaccine selection strategy has not been effective in some years. This motivates the search for a better strategy for choosing vaccine strains. In this work, we use recent results from theoretical immunology to formulate the vaccine selection problem as a discrete-time stochastic dynamic program with a high-dimensional continuous state space. We discuss the techniques that were developed for solving this difficult dynamic program, and present an effective and robust heuristic policy. We compare the performance of the heuristic policy, the follow policy, and the no-vaccine policy and show that the heuristic policy is the best among the three. After taking the cost of implementation into account, however, we conclude that the WHO policy is a cost-effective influenza vaccine strain selection policy.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Joseph T. (Joseph Tszkei), 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lawrence M. Wein.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29600

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29600