Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection.

Authors

Ulrik Hvid, Bjarke Frost Nielsen, Kim Sneppen

Published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Volume 123. Issue 43. Pages e2614436123. Oct 27, 2026. Epub Oct 20, 2026.

Abstract

Respiratory viruses spread within the host through a combination of local expansion and occasional long-range dissemination that seeds new infection foci. We present LEAP (Lotka-Euler Airway Pathogen model), an analytically tractable within-host model that captures this two-scale process. The model takes the form of an age-dependent branching process and yields a closed-form expression for the exponential growth rate during early infection. Using empirical data to parameterize the model, we find that productive dissemination requires only a small number of successful long-range seeding events per infected cell, with distinct values for SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus. LEAP further predicts that, in these well-adapted viruses, interferon-mediated restriction only weakly affects exponential growth, while remaining decisive for poorly adapted pathogens. More broadly, the model provides a flexible framework for experimentally testable predictions of early infection dynamics.

PMID:
42900729
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 21 Oct 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.