A Multiscale Multicellular Spatiotemporal Model of Local Influenza Infection and Immune Response

Respiratory viral infections pose a serious public health concern, from mild seasonal influenza to pandemics like those of SARS-CoV-2. Spatiotemporal dynamics of viral infection impact nearly all aspects of the progression of a viral infection, like the dependence of viral replication rates on the type of cell and pathogen, the strength of the immune response and localization of infection. Mathematical modeling is often used to describe respiratory viral infections and the immune response to them using ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. However, ODE models neglect spatially-resolved biophysical mechanisms like lesion shape and the details of viral transport, and so cannot model spatial effects of a viral infection and immune response. In this work, we develop a multiscale, multicellular spatiotemporal model of influenza infection and immune response by combining non-spatial ODE modeling and spatial, cell-based modeling. We employ cellularization, a recently developed method for generating spatial, cell-based, stochastic models from non-spatial ODE models, to generate much of our model from a calibrated ODE model that describes infection, death and recovery of susceptible cells and innate and adaptive responses during influenza infection, and develop models of cell migration and other mechanisms not explicitly described by the ODE model. We determine new model parameters to generate agreement between the spatial and original ODE models under certain conditions, where simulation replicas using our model serve as microconfigurations of the ODE model, and compare results between the models to investigate the nature of viral exposure and impact of heterogeneous infection on the time-evolution of the viral infection. We found that using spatially homogeneous initial exposure conditions consistently with those employed during calibration of the ODE model generates far less severe infection, and that local exposure to virus must be multiple orders of magnitude greater than a uniformly applied exposure to all available susceptible cells. This strongly suggests a prominent role of localization of exposure in influenza A infection. We propose that the particularities of the microenvironment to which a virus is introduced plays a dominant role in disease onset and progression, and that spatially resolved models like ours may be important to better understand and more reliably predict future health states based on susceptibility of potential lesion sites using spatially resolved patient data of the state of an infection. We can readily integrate the immune response components of our model into other modeling and simulation frameworks of viral infection dynamics that do detailed modeling of other mechanisms like viral internalization and intracellular viral replication dynamics, which are not explicitly represented in the ODE model. We can also combine our model with available experimental data and modeling of exposure scenarios and spatiotemporal aspects of mechanisms like mucociliary clearance that are only implicitly described by the ODE model, which would significantly improve the ability of our model to present spatially resolved predictions about the progression of influenza infection and immune response.