{
  "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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "PandemiX - Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Pandemic Signatures, Copenhagen 2300, Denmark",
    "Biocomplexity, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2100, Denmark"
  ],
  "article_type": "research article",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 3,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Ulrik Hvid",
      "orcid": "0009-0009-5863-2012"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Bjarke Frost Nielsen",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3868-9187"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Kim Sneppen",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-9820-3567"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ae89t7xctk0w2.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1073/pnas.2614436123",
  "fulltext_url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13715758/",
  "id": "ae89t7xctk0w2",
  "issns": [
    "0027-8424",
    "1091-6490"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2614436123",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "heading",
      "408"
    ],
    [
      "heading",
      "530"
    ],
    [
      "heading",
      "Biological Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "heading",
      "Biophysics and Computational Biology"
    ],
    [
      "heading",
      "Sdg-3-Good-Health-and-Well-Being"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2739|Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223070880",
  "pdf_url": null,
  "pmcid": "PMC13715758",
  "pmid": "42900729",
  "published": "2026-10-20",
  "publisher": "National Academy of Sciences",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ae89t7xctk0w2.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-01T12:22:58Z",
      "native_id": "PMC13715758",
      "source": "pmc",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2614436123"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "openalex:2739|Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models",
      "subfield": "epidemiology-public-health"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection",
  "title_text": "Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-01T12:22:58Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ae89t7xctk0w2",
  "venue": "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America",
  "versions": []
}