Directed attenuation to enhance vaccine immunity
Fig 2
Attenuation by reducing the growth rate r of the virus.
Solid lines indicate wild-type; dashed and dotted indicate attenuated. Reducing virus growth rate results in lower viral load as well as a reduction in the final level of adaptive immunity. (A) Dynamics for the wild-type infection in solid lines (red for virus, blue and black for adaptive and innate immunity) and for viruses with a 20% (dashed) and 40% reduced growth rate (dotted). (B) Impact of the degree of attenuation (reduction in r) on both the final level of adaptive immunity (blue) and the pathology (maximum virus load, red). (C) The tradeoff between pathology and peak adaptive immunity from changing growth rate r: reducing the growth rate results in lower pathology but also lower immunity. Parameters values are given in Table 1.