Related papers: Coevolutionary immune system dynamics driving path…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
The vertebrate adaptive immune system provides a flexible and diverse set of molecules to neutralize pathogens. Yet, viruses such as HIV can cause chronic infections by evolving as quickly as the adaptive immune system, forming an…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
We consider a spatial stochastic model for a pathogen population growing inside a host that attempts to eliminate the pathogens through its immune system. The pathogen population is divided into different types. A pathogen can either…
Pathogens drive changes in host immune systems that in turn exert pressure for pathogens to evolve. Quantifying and understanding this constant coevolutionary process has clear practical global health implications. Yet its relatively easier…
We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…
The adaptive immune system engages in an arms race with evolving viruses, trying to generate new responses to viral strains that continually move away from the set of variants that have already elicited a functional immune response. In…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
Different pathogens spreading in the same host population often generate complex co-circulation dynamics because of the many possible interactions between the pathogens and the host immune system, the host life cycle, and the space…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…
The evolution of many microbes and pathogens, including circulating viruses such as seasonal influenza, is driven by immune pressure from the host population. In turn, the immune systems of infected populations get updated, chasing viruses…
We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship…
Many illnesses are associated with an alteration of the immune system homeostasis due to any combination of factors, including exogenous bacterial insult, endogenous breakdown (e.g., development of a disease that results in immuno…
Mathematical disease modelling has long operated under the assumption that any one infectious disease is caused by one transmissible pathogen spreading among a population. This paradigm has been useful in simplifying the biological reality…
Interactions among multiple infectious agents are increasingly recognized as a fundamental issue in the understanding of key questions in public health, regarding pathogen emergence, maintenance, and evolution. The full description of…
Mathematical models of infectious disease transmission typically neglect within-host dynamics. Yet within-host dynamics - including pathogen replication, host immune responses, and interactions with microbiota - are crucial not only for…
We investigate the dynamics of a simple epidemiological model for the invasion by a pathogen strain of a population where another strain circulates. We assume that reinfection by the same strain is possible but occurs at a reduced rate due…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
In this paper we study intra-host viral adaptation by antigenic cooperation - a mechanism of immune escape that serves as an alternative to the standard mechanism of escape by continuous genomic diversification and allows to explain a…