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Alex Dornburg, UNC Charlotte
October 28, 2024 @ 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Forecasting Reinfection Risks with Evolutionary Medicine
Alex Dornburg, Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at UNC Charlotte
Abstract
Over the next century, human population growth and increased interactions with wildlife are expected to drive a rise in viral zoonotic transmission. In response, proactive measures to prepare for the emergence of novel viral pathogens have become essential. A major challenge in combating new viruses is the lack of knowledge regarding the duration of protective immunity—critical information for both short- and long-term policy decisions. Traditionally, estimating the durability of immunity would require multi-year studies. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the severe drawbacks of relying on the prolonged timelines of conventional data collection to inform urgent policy decisions. This disconnect highlights the need for rapid methods that can close this knowledge gap by estimating likely times to reinfection and the durability of immunity.
We demonstrate the viability of leveraging evolutionary approaches alongside long-term infection and antibody data from human-infecting viruses. By applying these methods, we estimate infection probabilities relative to antibody decline and translate these estimates into projected times to reinfection and immunity duration for SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, we show that this approach can be extended to predict the timing of breakthrough infections following vaccination and the probability of breakthrough under different mRNA booster schedules for immuno-typical individuals or those undergoing specific immune modulating treatments. Finally, we demonstrate how forecasts of seasonal infection surges can be integrated to provide guidance on optimal booster vaccination timing that is cognizant of past infection histories for individual patients.
These results demonstrate the utility of comparative phylogenetic methods in providing a quantitative basis for otherwise unknown parameters that are fundamental to personal, clinical, and public health policy decision-making.
Join us on Monday, October 28 at 1:30 PM in Stephens Room (3503 Thomas Hall) and ZOOM for the Genetics and Genomics Seminar Series.
REGISTER to attend Zoom: https://ncsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUufu2rrDwuGtMzQ2ivMoBl4_LJ-eSGAZ4q No registration is required to attend In-Person
If you would like to meet with Alex Dornburg, please contact host Jeff Yoder (jayoder@ncsu.edu).