A stochastic model of latently infected cell reactivation and viral blip generation in treated HIV patients.

ABSTRACT: Motivated by viral persistence in HIV+ patients on long-term anti-retroviral treatment (ART), we present a stochastic model of HIV viral dynamics in the blood stream. We consider the hypothesis that the residual viremia in patients on ART can be explained principally by the activation of cells latently infected by HIV before the initiation of ART and that viral blips (clinically-observed short periods of detectable viral load) represent large deviations from the mean. We model the system as a continuous-time, multi-type branching process. Deriving equations for the probability generating function we use a novel numerical approach to extract the probability distributions for latent reservoir sizes and viral loads. We find that latent reservoir extinction-time distributions underscore the im

SUBMITTER: Conway JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3084212 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature