Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection
- 1PandemiX - Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Pandemic Signatures, Copenhagen 2300, Denmark
- 2Biocomplexity, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2100, Denmark
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.
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BibTeX
@article{hvid2026bridging,
title = {{Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection}},
author = {Ulrik Hvid and Bjarke Frost Nielsen and Kim Sneppen},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2614436123},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2614436123},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Bridging spatial scales in respiratory viral infection
AU - Ulrik Hvid
AU - Bjarke Frost Nielsen
AU - Kim Sneppen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2614436123
UR - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2614436123
AB - 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.
SN - 0027-8424
SN - 1091-6490
ER -