Optimal control of treatment in a mathematical model of chronic myelogenous leukemia.

We consider a mathematical model of drug therapy for chronic myelogenous leukemia for an individual patient over a fixed time horizon. The disease dynamics are given by a system of ordinary differential equations that describe the interaction between naive T cells, effector T cells and leukemic cancer cells in a hypothetical patient. We introduce two drug therapies into this model, one a targeted therapy, and the other a broad cytotoxic therapy. Our goal is to find treatment regimens that minimize the cancer cell count and the deleterious effects of the drugs for a given patient. We examine the control setting analytically, and include numerical solutions to illustrate the optimal regimens under various assumptions.