Schedule Aug 19, 2003
Pattern Formation in a model describing the dynamics of HIV infection
Rita Maria Zorzenon dos Santos (Univ. Federal de Pernambuco~Brazil)

The common pattern observed in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected patients is a three-stage behavior in their T cell and virus counts: the primary infection, the latency period and the onset of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome(AIDS). Here we present a cellular automata model that describes the spread of HIV infection in lymphoid tissues, taking into account the global features of the usual immune response to any virus, the fast mutation rate of the virus, and the spatial localization that may occur in the lymphoid nodes. Our results reproduce the entire course of infection and are in good agreement with the experimental findings. We also found that the infected cells organize themselves into spatial structures, which may be associated to the in vitro structures called syncytia, which are responsible for the decrease on the concentration of uninfected cells, leading to AIDS. We briefly discuss also the robustness of the model and the distribution of the latency periods.

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