The role of long-lived plasma cells in viral clearance

ABSTRACT

The adaptive immune system has two types of plasma cells (PC), long-lived plasma cells (LLPC) and short-lived plasma cells (SLPC), that differ in their lifespan. In this paper, we propose that LLPC is crucial to the clearance of viral particles in addition to reducing the viral basic reproduction number in secondary infections. We use a sequence of within-host mathematical models to show that, CD8 T cells, SLPC and memory B cells cannot achieve full viral clearance, and the viral load will reach a low positive equilibrium level because of a continuous replenishment of target cells. However, the presence of LLPC is crucial for viral clearance.

KEYWORDS:

• Viral clearance
• adaptive immune system
• basic reproduction number
• within-host mathematical model
• secondary infection

MATHEMATICS SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION (2020):

• 92C30

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11771075, 12271088) (ML), Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (No. 21ZR1401000, No. 23ZR1401700) (ML), and two discovery grants of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Canada (RE, JM), two NSERC EIDM grants (OMNI and MfPH) (JM), and the China Scholarship Council (202106630037) (MZ).