When does humoral memory enhance infection?

Antibodies and humoral memory are key components of the adaptive immune system. We consider and computationally model mechanisms by which humoral memory present at baseline might increase rather than decrease infection load; we refer to this effect as EI-HM (enhancement of infection by humoral memory). We first consider antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) in which antibody enhances the growth of the pathogen, typically a virus, and typically at intermediate 'Goldilocks' levels of antibody.

Bayesian validation framework for dynamic epidemic models.

Complex models of infectious diseases are used to understand the transmission dynamics of the disease, project the course of an epidemic, predict the effect of interventions and/or provide information for power calculations of community level intervention studies. However, there have been relatively few opportunities to rigorously evaluate the predictions of such models till now. Indeed, while there is a large literature on calibration (fitting model parameters) and validation (comparing model outputs to data) of complex models based on empirical data, the lack of uniformity in accepted criteria for such procedures for models of infectious diseases has led to simple procedures being prevalent for such steps.