War in the Body: The Evolutionary Arms Race Between HIV and the Human Immune System and the Implications for Vaccines

ISBN-13: 9781489992550 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 298 str.

W. David Wick; Otto O. Yang

Opis

In the relatively few decades since the introduction of HIV into the human population, variants of the virus have diverged to such an extent that, were the discussion about something other than viruses, said variants could easily be classified as differentspecies. This book will consider these evolutionary variations, as well as the different and, at times, opposing theories attempting to explain them. It will compare and contrast the ways in which the immune system and drugs affect the virus's evolution, and the implications of these for vaccine development. The issue will be explored and explained through "ecological genetics," which postulatesthatall living organisms have, besides rivals, enemies. This is divergent from the more traditional school of "population genetics," which emphasizes that evolution occurs among rival species (or variants thereof) that competefor niches or resources in a fixed, unreactive environment. Both models will be formulatedusing mathematical models, which will be included in the book. Finally, it will consider the possibilities for designing a vaccine that blocks HIV from escaping the immune system."

Recenzje

From the reviews:

"Provide a critical overview of the mathematical modeling performed so far to understand HIV immunity and escape, and advance an innovative alternative approach for stochastic simulation. ... War in the Body is not a how-to guide, tutorial, or cook-book, but a research monograph, with thought exercises to cultivate problem-solving skills and foster developing plausible, stable numerical simulations." (Complexity, March, 2014)

Spis treści

The HIV Infection model.- The CTL Model.- Simulating an HIV Infection In Vivo.- The Escape Formula.- Early and Late Escapes.- Understanding Escape.- More Topics about Escape from Immune Control.- HIV's Cloaking Device: The Fascinating Story of Nef.- Retroviral Sex and Escape.- The Ne Business Again and a Proposed Experiment.- Can a T-cell Vaccine Block Escape?.- The STEP Trial and the Future of T-cell Vaccines.- Short Tutorial on Dynamical Models.- Deterministic Modeling: A Cautionary Example.- The Infection Model Defined.- The CTL Model Defined.- On Simulation Techniques.- Derivation of the Escape Formula.- Statistics of the Mutant Lineage in Classical Genetics.- Extinction Probabilities with Extra Poisson Variation.- Computing the Boundaries.- Co-existence or Replacement?.- The Nef-Deletion Threshold Formulas.- Modeling Retroviral Sex.

O autorze

Dr. Yang is a well known T-Cell and HIV expert at UCLA. Dr. Wick is recently retired. His last position was Senior Scientist in the Infectious Diseases Division of the Fred Hutchison Center, in Seattle, where he worked on immune response to HIV and vaccines.