Scaling in the Immune System and Computational Immunology: Lecture Series

How different is the immune system in a human from that of a mouse? Do pathogens replicate at the same rate in different species? Answers to these questions have impact on human health since multi-host pathogens that jump from animals to humans affect millions worldwide.

It is not known how rates of immune response and viral dynamics vary from species to species and how they depend on species body size. Metabolic scaling theory predicts that intracellular processes will be slower in larger animals since cellular metabolic rates are slower. We test how rates of pathogenesis and immune system response rates depend on species body size.

We hypothesize that immune response rates are invariant with body size. Our work suggests how the physical architecture of the immune system and chemical signals within it may lead to nearly scale-invariant immune search and response.

We fit mathematical models to experimental West Nile Virus (WNV, a multi-host pathogen) infection data and investigate how model parameters characterizing the pathogen and the immune response change with respect to animal mass.

Phylogeny also affects pathogenesis and immune response. We use a hierarchical Bayesian model, that incorporates phylogeny, to test hypotheses about the role of mass and phylogeny on pathogen replication and immune response. We observe that:

1. Hierarchical models (informed by phylogeny) make more accurate predictions of experimental data and more realistic estimates of biologically relevant parameters characterizing WNV infection.

2. Rates of WNV production decline with species body mass, modified by a phylogenetic influence.

Our work is the first to systematically explore the role of host body mass in pathogenesis using mathematical models and empirical data. We investigate the complex interplay between the physical structure of the immune system and host body mass in determining immune response. The modeling strategies and tools outlined here are likely to be applicable to modeling of other multi-host pathogens. This work could also be extended to understand how drug and vaccine efficacy in humans may systematically differ from that in model organisms like mice, in which most initial experimental studies are conducted.