Mathematical models for vaccination, waning immunity and immune system boosting: a general framework

摘要

When the body gets infected by a pathogen or receives a vaccine dose, theimmune system develops pathogen-specific immunity. Induced immunity decays intime and years after recovery/vaccination the host might become susceptibleagain. Exposure to the pathogen in the environment boosts the immune systemthus prolonging the duration of the protection. Such an interplay of withinhost and population level dynamics poses significant challenges in rigorousmathematical modeling of immuno-epidemiology. The aim of this paper is twofold.First, we provide an overview of existing models for waning ofdisease/vaccine-induced immunity and immune system boosting. Then a newmodeling approach is proposed for SIRVS dynamics, monitoring the immune statusof individuals and including both waning immunity and immune system boosting.We show that some previous models can be considered as special cases orapproximations of our framework.