Aging and Adaptation in Infectious Diseases III/KatieGostic

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Notes by user Katie Gostic (UCLA) for Aging and Adaptation in Infectious Diseases III

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

• Presentation highlights
• Open questions that came up
• How your perspective changed
• Impact on your own work
• e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

Immunity to antigenically variable pathogens arises from an individual's history of exposures to multiple strains. The success of a new strain in turn depends on how strongly it is recognized by immune responses generated against previous strains. Traditionally, cross-reactivity between two strains is thought to depend on the similarity between their antigenic structures. Antigenic maps are a widely used visualization tool in which the distance between strains (represented as points in Euclidean space) provides a measure of their antigenic similarity, and potential for cross-reactivity.  

However, the concept of a fixed antigenic distance between two strains implies that all hosts, regardless of their age and exposure history, would gain the same degree of cross-protection against strain B, given exposure to or vaccination with strain A. This contradicts a growing body of experimental and epidemiological evidence, showing that individuals with different exposure histories can exhibit vastly different levels of cross-protection against the same viral challenge.

We are developing an individual-based model which we will use to explore how differences in individual exposure history can cause hosts to perceive different antigenic distances between strains. We will use this model to explore how history-specific differences in immunity arise, and to what extent they cause immunity to differ from the predictions of existing maps, which assume a fixed distance between strains.

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Reference material notes

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• Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
• Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
• This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
• Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

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