Modeling the virus-immune system interactions in the peripheral bloodstream of HIV infected individuals using a cellular automata model with considering the effects of antiretroviral therapy
Affiliations: [a] Department of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran | [b] Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Science, Tehran, Iran | [c] Research Center for Biomedical Technologies and Robotics, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: A.H. Jafari, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Poursina Street, Tehran, Iran. Tel.: +98 2166466383; E-mail:[email protected]
Abstract: BACKGROUND: According to the World Health Organization, by the end
of last year, about 37 million people throughout the world were diagnosed
with AIDS and millions of people die each year from this disease. OBJECTIVE: To develop an appropriate model which depicts the
mechanism of the dynamics involved in the interactions between HIV and
immune system in peripheral bloodstream of HIV infected individuals by
considering the phenomena of virus mutation and taking into account the role
of latently infected cells in speared of infection and considering the
effects of antiretroviral drugs and occurrence of drug resistance in our
model in order to assess the results obtained from applying different
therapeutic methods. METHODS: Two-dimensional CA model with Moor neighboring was
developed. Various agents which they were referring to peripheral
bloodstream particles of HIV infected individuals were defined. Then the
biological rules were extracted from both expert knowledge and the
authoritative articles. The extracted rules were applied for updating the
states of these agents. The effects of using antiretroviral drug treatment
were considered by applying drug's effectiveness of both of protease and
reverse transcriptase inhibitors as two separate inputs of model. RESULTS: Time evolution curves of concentrations of defined agents
were shown as our results. In case of considering no treatment, our results
showed that concentrations of healthy CD4+T cells reached the threshold of
AIDS after a bout 250 weeks. By applying monotherapy method, the
concentrations of these cells remained on the threshold of AIDS for a long
time and applying combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) method leaded to
increase the concentration of these cells 20% upper than threshold of
AIDS. Also, by applying monotherapy and cART compared with no treatment, the
concentrations of infected CD4+T cells 10% and 40% decreased further,
respectively and for the level of viral load, leads to a reduction of almost
55% and 90%, respectively. Belated treatment, comparison with early
treatment, caused almost 10% reduce (increase) in steady state
concentrations of healthy (infected) cells.
Keywords: HIV infection, %immune system, %cellular automata model, %Antiretroviral therapy
