Cell motility represents an important hallmark of immune processes governing cell interactions, communication and function. Determining how external factors, such as chemokine gradients and structural elements, influence immune cell motility is therefore of critical importance to understand the development of immune responses and their impact on pathological changes within complex tissue...
Rising antimicrobial resistance drives the search for dosing strategies that maximize bacterial eradication while minimizing unnecessary drug exposure. Standard indices, such as the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) or the time spent above MIC ($\%T_{>MIC}$), are static snapshots that often fail to capture the time-varying nature of periodic dosing. To address this gap, we introduce the...
Awaiting abstract.
Adoptive T cell therapy is a promising immunotherapy for treating cancer, leveraging the T cellโs natural ability to kill cancer cells. A crucial step in this therapy involves the expansion of T cells ex vivo, however, it can be difficult to balance the desired amounts of memory, effector and dysfunctional T cell subtypes. Mathematical modelling of T cell expansion is a powerful tool that can...
Hepatitis B infections become chronic in approximately 5% of adult infections and 80-90% of childhood infections. Once HBV has become chronic, no cure exists yet. Current clinical research aims to reach a functional cure, defined as the sustained loss of HBV surface antigens (HBsAg). Lately, the GLP-26, a capsid assembly modulator leading to the release of uninfectious empty particles, has...
Dual IL-10/PD-1 blockade in ART-treated, SIVmac239-infected rhesus macaques (RMs) produced durable control of viral rebound after analytical treatment interruption (ATI). We analyzed the longitudinal data from 28 RMs randomized to vehicle (n=8), antiโIL-10 (n=10), or antiโIL-10+antiโPD-1 (n=10): plasma viremia, cell-associated vRNA/vDNA, intact proviral DNA (IPDA), and multiple immune markers...
Understanding the mechanisms underlying post-therapy control of simianโhuman immunodeficiency virus (SHIV) is critical for the development of functional cure strategies. In this study, we develop viral kinetic models and validate them using viral load data from four cohorts of SHIV-infected nonhuman primates: untreated controls, animals receiving HuAd5 SIV Gag/Tat vaccination, animals treated...
Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is responsible for approximately one million deaths per year, worldwide. While existing therapies effectively block the production of new virus, viral rebound occurs rapidly if treatment is stopped. As a result, no cure for chronic HBV infection is currently available. Patients therefore typically receive treatment indefinitely with corresponding...
Studying immunology in humans is extremely challenging, for obvious ethical reasons. Mathematics, combined with experiment, can provide a unique and valuable insight. We will focus on a family of immune receptors called KIRs (killer immunoglobulin like receptors). We combine analysis of genetic data from large patient cohorts with mechanistic mathematical modelling and assays of in vitro and...
Influenza A virus infections are a major cause of human morbidity and mortality worldwide. A key aspect of the immune response, bridging innate and adaptive immunity, is the role of interferons. Here, we present experimental data identifying the primary producers of Type II interferon and providing novel insights into production rates via the integrated Median Fluorescence Intensity. This...
High-fidelity synthetic data is a critical frontier for
disease modelling, yet few generalized methods exist to quantify
whether generated virtual patients maintain physiological resemblance.
Building on our previous work in machine learning-enabled immune
profiling [1], we introduce a robust framework to assess the quality
of synthetically generated immunobiological datasets. We...
Cellular protein interactome data are fundamental to determine mechanisms of pathogens, infection progression, and potential drug targets. Performing network analysis provides a data-driven middle ground between differential gene expression analysis, which assumes that gene expression is largely independent, and highly detailed mathematical models, which require careful measurements or...
The paradigm of NK cell activation is the โMissing-Self Hypothesisโ; NK cells kill cells that lack MHC. When considering a single interaction between an NK cell and a target cell, the โMissing-Self Hypothesisโ offers a plausible explanation for NK cell activation. However, an NK cellโs interaction with a target cell is not an isolated event. Experimental studies have shown that NK cells in an...
Flaviviruses such as Dengue, Zika, Yellow Fever and West Nile virus represent major global public health threats. Envelope (E) proteins on the viral surface mediate host-cell attachment and membrane fusion. These 180 E proteins are arranged in a highly ordered geometry that shapes epitope accessibility and antibody binding.
Neutralization of flaviviruses is primarily mediated by monoclonal...
Awaiting abstract.
The determinants of influenza transmission at the level of individual contacts remain poorly understood. We analyze a unique dataset of controlled ferret transmission experiments in which one or two infected donors interact with four susceptible recipients for varying durations (typically 1โ4 hours), combining high-resolution video and longitudinal viral load measurements to link time-resolved...
This minisymposium showcases concrete progress in understanding immunobiology and infections using mathematical and computational methods under real experimental and clinical constraints. The speakers work at the boundary of immunology, medicine, and quantitative science, combining mechanistic modeling with modern computational and statistical tools to provide insights into complex biological...
