Related papers: Pathogen diversity emerging from coevolutionary dy…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
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…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…
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…
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…
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…
The increase in the connectivity between hosts in recent times has facilitated the emergence of more aggressive mutant viral strains, making their containment and eradication significantly more challenging compared to the original variants.…
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…
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…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
The propagations of diseases, behaviors and information in real systems are rarely independent of each other, but they are coevolving with strong interactions. To uncover the dynamical mechanisms, the evolving spatiotemporal patterns and…
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…
Multi-strain competition on networks is observed in many contexts, including infectious disease ecology, information dissemination or behavioral adaptation to epidemics. Despite a substantial body of research has been developed considering…
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…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
Coevolutionary arms races form between interacting populations that constitute each other's environment and respond to mutual changes. This inherently far-from-equilibrium process finds striking manifestations in the adaptive immune system,…
We formulate a compartmental model for the propagation of a respiratory disease in a patchy environment. The patches are connected through the mobility of individuals, and we assume that disease transmission and recovery are possible during…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
During infectious disease epidemics, pathogen transmission occurs in host populations made up of interacting subpopulations. Using stochastic simulation and analytical approximations, we examine how outbreak sizes in networked populations…