Mathematical Model Identifies Promising Drug Combinations for Heart Attack Treatment

Each year, more than 800,000 Americans suffer a heart attack, and for those who survive, the body's own immune response can become a second threat — inflaming already-damaged tissue in the critical weeks that follow. Researchers at Ohio State University have turned to mathematics as a new kind of medicine, building a model from differential equations that simulates how immune cells respond to combinations of anti-inflammatory drugs after cardiac events. The work does not offer a cure today, but it offers something rarer: a rigorous framework for asking better questions about how we might prote