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Revising Ecological Assumptions About Human Papillomavirus Interactions And Type Replacement

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accepted manuscript Jan 2014.pdf (936.6 KB)

Date

2014-06-07

Authors

Murall, Carmen Lia
McCann, Kevin S.
Bauch, Chris T.

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Elsevier

Abstract

The controversy over whether vaccine-targeted HPV types will be replaced by other oncogenic, non-vaccine-targeted types remains unresolved. This is in part because little is known about the ecology of HPV types. Patient data has been interpreted to suggest independence or facilitative interactions between types and therefore replacement is believed to be unlikely. With a novel mathematical model, we investigated which HPV type interactions and their immune responses gave qualitatively similar patterns frequently observed in patients. To assess the possibility of type replacement, vaccination was added to see if non-vaccine-targeted types increased their 'niche'. Our model predicts that independence and facilitation are not necessary for the coexistence of types inside hosts, especially given the patchy nature of HPV infection. In fact, independence and facilitation inadequately represented co-infected patients. We found that some form of competition is likely in natural co-infections. Hence, non-vaccine-targeted types that are not cross-reactive with the vaccine could spread to more patches and can increase their viral load in vaccinated hosts. The degree to which this happens will depend on replication and patch colonization rates. Our results suggest that independence between types could be a fallacy, and so without conclusively untangling HPV within-host ecology, type replacement remains theoretically viable. More ecological thinking is needed in future studies.

Description

The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.12.028 © 2014. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Keywords

HPV, Within-host ecology, Strain replacement, Strain interactions, Metapopulation dynamics

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Citation

URI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.12.028
 http://hdl.handle.net/10012/13884

Collections

Waterloo Research
Applied Mathematics