Viral-Immune Interaction in HIV Infection

HIV epidemic has caused a health crisis globally. We haveanalyzed and modeled data from animal models of HIV, HSV andinfluenza virus, aiming to understand the role of neutralizingantibodies (nAbs), CD4+ T cells, CTLs and APCs in HIV infection.Our analysis demonstrates that passive antibodies confer protectionagainst macaque SHIV89.6P by either neutralizing the initial viralinoculums or reducing the acute viral growth. Therefore, vaccinesthat elicit high nAb levels during early infection may inducesterilizing immunity or delay disease progression. We further showa positive correlation between peak viral level and the acute CD4+T cell depletion in SHIV89.6P infection, which implies thatreduction of peak viral level significantly preserves CD4+ T cells.Further study on influenza and HSV-1 infections suggests thatantigen loading rate of APC determines the magnitude of antigenpresentation and the APC decay is mainly due to the degradation ofpMHC, not CTL killing. The slow kinetics of HIV viral growth may beone factor that limits the level of antigen presentation andsubsequent CTL response. This book should be helpful forvirologists, epidemiologists and HIV researchers.