On the Dynamics of the Evolution of the HIV Infection

Abstract

We use a cellular automata model to study the evolution of HIV infection and the onset of AIDS. The model takes into account the global features of the immune response to any pathogen, the fast mutation rate of the HIV and a fair amount of spatial localization. Our results reproduce quite well the three-phase pattern observed in T cell and virus counts of infected patients, namely, the primary response, the clinical latency period and the onset of AIDS. We have also found that the infected cells may organize themselves into special spatial structures since the primary infection, leading to a decrease on the concentration of uninfected cells. Our results suggest that these cell aggregations, which can be associated to syncytia, leads to AIDS.

4 pages, 3 postscript figures

References in corpus (2)

• HIV time hierarchy: Winning the war while, loosing all the battles
• Immunization and Aging: a Learning Process in the Immune Network

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• HIV time hierarchy: Winning the war while, loosing all the battles
• Intensity Coding in Two-Dimensional Excitable Neural Networks
• Robustness of a Cellular Automata Model for the HIV Infection
• A Physical Theory of the Competition that Allows HIV to Escape from the Immune System
• Critical behavior of the SIS epidemic model with time-dependent infection rate
• Cellular Automata Simulation of Medication-Induced Autoimmune Diseases
• Dynamics of HIV Infection: an entropic-energetic view
• Shift-Symmetric Configurations in Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata: Irreversibility, Insolvability, and Enumeration