Heterogeneity in HIV viral rebound
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) effectively controls HIV infection, suppressing HIV viral loads. While typically suspension of therapy is rapidly followed by rebound of viral loads to high, pre-therapy levels, recent observations give nuance to that statement: in a small fraction of cases, rebound may be delayed by months, years, or even possibly, permanently. We will discuss modeling to investigate that heterogeneity in outcome of treatment suspension. Specifically we will focus on time to rebound. We will first discuss our data-validated, mechanistically-motivated survival function for time-to-rebound using time-inhomogeneous branching processes. We show good agreement with data for both rapid and significantly delayed viral rebound. We will then use this model to characterize the impact of covariates such as treatment initiation time on time to rebound.