Investigating Combined Drug and Plasma Apheresis Therapy of HIV Infection by Double Compartment Cellular Automata Simulation

It has become widely acknowledged that potent combination drug therapy of patients infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus can significantly prolong life, but exerts detrimental effect on a patient's quality of life. Lymph nodes and lymphatic tissue are busy sites of immunological activity. Germs are brought there by the cells of the immune system to be broken down and analyzed. However, clinics commonly used blood tests for viral load therein to assess the effect of drug therapy. We are therefore of the opinion that most cellular automata models in the past that only considered viral proliferation in the lymph node cannot give a sufficiently accurate picture of the dynamics of HIV infection, especially when the impact of treatments that combine both drugs and plasma apheresis are in question. We thus present a two-compartment cellular automata (CA) model, which simulates the dynamics of HIV infection in both the lymph node and blood compartments when drugs and plasma apheresis are applied simultaneously. It is found that the combined usage of these two types of therapy yields more favorable outcome than the sole use of plasma apheresis.