- Series
- Mathematical Biology Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - 11:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Pavel Skums – CDC
- Organizer
- Leonid Bunimovich
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects 2.2% of the world's population and is a
major cause of liver disease worldwide. There is no vaccine against HCV
and current interferon and ribavirin (IFN/RBV) therapy is effective in
50%-60% of patients. Since the interferon therapy is the expansive and
painful for the patient process, it is very important to predict its
outcome before starting full course of treatment.
HCV exists in infected patients as a large viral population of
intra-host variants (quasispecies), which form the certain topological
structure (sequence space) and may be differentially resistant to
interferon treatment. We present a method for measuring differential
interferon resistance of HCV quasispecies based on the mathematical
modeling and analysis of HCV population dynamics during the first hours
of interferon therapy. The analysis of the model allowed us to
accurately predict the long-term outcome of the interferon therapy on
the test group of patients.