Immuno-Epidemiological Models

 

Between-Host Model

 

Biological processes occur at nested scales of organizations and infectious diseases are not an exception. Pathogen reproduction, transmission and evolution are processes that span several scales of biological organization, such as intercellular, within-host and population scales. In classical (ODE) epidemiological models, the host is modeled as "infectious" or "recovered", despite the fact that infected host transitions through several levels of infectiousness while its immune system is fighting the pathogen. Recently, researchers have been working on closing this gap between immunology and epidemiology, terming this new merged field as immuno-epidemiology. Our recent work focuses on coupling within-host immune dynamics with between-host infectious disease models. One of the key outcomes of this research is that the practical identifiability improves when you fit within-host model and the between-host model simultaneously.

 

Multi Scale Model