Dr. Alison Hill
Research Fellow, Harvard Univ., Prog. for Evolutionary Dynamics
Research Profile
Countdown to a cure? Mathematical approaches to designing better HIV treatments
Thursday, Nov. 14, 2 PM, RRI 101
Abstract: HIV infection can be effectively treated with combination antiretroviral therapy, but new classes of drugs are needed to permanently cure the infection. In this talk I will discuss our work developing mathematical and computational methods to better understand the mechanisms of HIV persistence and evaluate new methods to cure the disease. Firstly, I will show how models have helped us understand how much the pool of latent virus must be reduced to delay or prevent the viral rebound when drugs are stopped. We explain why existing anti-latency drugs have had negligible benefit, and why we have seen multiple cases of apparent (but false) “cures” of HIV. Secondly, I will discuss how longitudinal studies of viral genetics during antiretroviral therapy can be used to help elucidate the dominant cause of long-term persistence. This includes a new method we have developed to quantify how important the proliferation of latently-infected cells is to driving long-term viral persistence, which also suggests that therapies to target this process could be highly effective. Finally, I will describe a series of studies using new immunotherapy strategies to cure HIV, and our work using mathematical models to uncover the mechanism of action of these interventions. Overall, this work highlights the role that simulation, analysis, and inference using mathematical models can play in informing new potentially-curative treatments for HIV.
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