Signaling during infections (Prof. Andriy Goychuk, HZI und TU Braunschweig)
Systems & Control Seminar
Abstract
In this talk, I will provide an overview of some of our recent and in-progress work relating to signal processing by the immune system. I will start with a systems-level perspective of metabolic regulation during infections, whereby cytokine signaling diverts resources in the form of glucose towards the immune system. We will discuss a minimal model showing how plasma glucose levels typically increase during infections, and how this improves host outcomes. Conversely, the model also shows how fast pathogen replication can lead to a reduction in plasma glucose levels if the host approaches its metabolic limits due to high cytokine levels and immune activity. Independent of the model details, the structural features of host-pathogen dynamics, reminiscent of predator-prey systems, predict an optimal pathogen clearance rate by adaptive immunity. If the clearance rate is too low, infection becomes persistent. If the clearance rate is too high, the immune response will cease too early, and pathogen will rebound. For the innate immune response, the model predicts that it should mainly delegate clearance to adaptive immunity. Next, we will discuss the stochastic dynamics of early infections by focusing on two different replication strategies: viral budding versus lytic replication (bursting). Numerical analysis of first-passage time statistics illuminates which strategies are favorable for viral growth, and which are favorable for viral persistence. In closing, I will provide an outlook on stochastic Fisher models of infection spread in tissues, and a high-level overview of our main body of work relating to genome organization and how this organization could change in response to forces during the activation of immune cells.
Biographical information
Andriy is a group leader at CAIMed (Lower Saxony Center for AI and Causal Methods in Medicine) and HZI (Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research), and Professor at the TU Braunschweig. Before returning to Germany, he was a Postdoc at MIT with support from EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) where he worked on topics ranging from polymer physics and biomolecular condensates to antibody binding and immune dynamics. He received his PhD from LMU Munich where he was part of the Graduate School for Quantitative Biosciences Munich. Andriy is broadly interested in understanding the physical principles underlying the processes of life and disease, with a focus on inflammation, immune signaling, and genome organization.
Termin
18. Juni 202610:30 - 11:30
