Modeling Prion Proliferation

Prion proteins are the infectious agents of prion diseases. They present as aggregates (poly-mers) of the abnormal form of a non-infectious protein (monomers). The mechanism of proliferation is an aggregation-fragmentation process. polymer of size x µ(x) β(x) τ (x) monomer A discrete model for this mechanism was introduced by [1]. Then a continuous version was proposed by [3] (see also [2]) where V (t) is the quantity of monomers and u(x, t) the quantity of polymers of size x: dV (t) dt = λ − V (t) γ