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Applied
Math Seminar |
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Mathematical modeling has had a direct impact on understanding the pathogenesis and treatment of HIV infection. After the development of sensitive assays that could measure the amount of virus in blood, mathematical analysis of dynamic changes in the level of virus at different stages of disease and in response to perturbations such as antiretroviral therapy has provided some revealing insights into the mechanism of CD4+ T cell depletion, the reasons for drug failure, the nature of viral reservoirs, and raised the intriguing possibility that prolonged therapy may lead to virus eradication. Surprisingly simple differential equation models allow one to make inferences about rates of viral replication, viral clearance and rates of death of virally infected cells from measurements of virus concentration during drug perturbation experiments. It is likely that lessons learned will have broad-reaching influence on the study of other infectious diseases such as hepatitis B and C virus infection. This lecture will review the study of viral dynamics, focusing on the problem of matching the sophistication of a mathematical model to the level of detail available from experimental data. |