Related papers: Bayesian analysis of immune response dynamics with…
In vaccine studies for infectious diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the frequency and type of contacts between study participants and infectious sources are among the most informative risk factors, but are often not…
Evaluation of HIV large scale interventions programme is becoming increasingly important, but impact estimates frequently hinge on knowledge of changes in behaviour such as the frequency of condom use (CU) over time, or other self-reported…
Safe and effective preventive vaccines have the potential to help stem the HIV epidemic. The efficacy of such vaccines is typically measured in randomized, double-blind phase IIb/III trials and described as a reduction in newly acquired HIV…
Understanding the dynamics of antibody levels is crucial for characterizing the time-dependent response to immune events: either infections or vaccinations. The sequence and timing of these events significantly influence antibody level…
A persistent public health challenge is finding immunization schemes that are effective in combating highly mutable pathogens such as HIV and influenza viruses. To address this, we analyze a simplified model of affinity maturation, the…
When our immune system encounters foreign antigens (i.e., from pathogens), the B cells that produce our antibodies undergo a cyclic process of proliferation, mutation, and selection, improving their ability to bind to the specific antigen.…
A major contribution to the onset and development of autoimmune disease is known to come from infections. An important practical problem is identifying the precise mechanism by which the breakdown of immune tolerance as a result of immune…
An interesting inference drawn by some Covid-19 epidemiological models is that there exists a proportion of the population who are not susceptible to infection -- even at the start of the current pandemic. This paper introduces a model of…
Recently, a long-term model of HIV infection dynamics was developed to describe the entire time course of the disease. It consists of a large system of ODEs with many parameters, and is expensive to simulate. In the current paper, this…
The advent and subsequent widespread availability of preventive vaccines has altered the course of public health over the past century. Despite this success, effective vaccines to prevent many high-burden diseases, including HIV, have been…
A key objective in vaccine studies is to evaluate vaccine-induced immunogenicity and determine whether participants have mounted a response to the vaccine. Cellular immune responses are essential for assessing vaccine-induced…
Understanding how vaccines perform against different pathogen genotypes is crucial for developing effective prevention strategies, particularly for highly genetically diverse pathogens like HIV. Sieve analysis is a statistical framework…
HIV dynamic studies have contributed significantly to the understanding of HIV pathogenesis and antiviral treatment strategies for AIDS patients. Establishing the relationship of virologic responses with clinical factors and covariates…
Developing accurate and reliable methods to estimate vaccine protection is a key goal in immunology and public health. While several statistical methods have been proposed, their potential inaccuracy in capturing fast intra-seasonal waning…
Understanding waning of vaccine-induced protection is important for both immunology and public health. Population heterogeneities in underlying (pre-vaccination) susceptibility and vaccine response can cause measured vaccine effectiveness…
The paper proposes a time-adaptive optimization approach for determining the time-dependent immune response function in a mathematical model of acute HIV infection, using clinical data from four untreated patients. We formulate the problem…
In immunological studies, the characterization of small, functionally distinct cell subsets from blood and tissue is crucial to decipher system level biological changes. An increasing number of studies rely on assays that provide…
Causal effect estimation for dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) contributes to sequential decision making. However, censoring and time-dependent confounding under DTRs are challenging as the amount of observational data declines over time due…
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…
Incorporating vaccination into mathematical models appears deceptively simple: models integrate vaccine-derived protections, such as reduced susceptibility to infection, using parameters informed by empirical estimates of vaccine efficacy…