Section: Application Domains

HIV immunotherapies

The management of HIV infected patients and the control of the epidemics have been revolutionized by the availability of highly active antiretroviral therapies. Patients treated by these combinations of antiretrovirals have most often undetectable viral loads with an immune reconstitution leading to a survival which is nearly the same to uninfected individuals [46]. Hence, it has been demonstrated that early start of antiretroviral treatments may be good for individual patients as well as for the control of the HIV epidemics (by reducing the transmission from infected people) [41]. However, the implementation of such strategy is difficult especially in developing countries. Some HIV infected individuals do not tolerate antiretroviral regimen or did not reconstitute their immune system. Therefore, vaccine and other immune interventions are required. Many vaccine candidates as well as other immune interventions (IL7, IL15) are currently evaluated. The challenges here are multiple because the effects of these interventions on the immune system are not fully understood, there are no good surrogate markers although the number of measured markers has exponentially increased. Hence, HIV clinical epidemiology has also entered in the era of Big Data because of the very deep evaluation at individual level leading to a huge amount of complex data, repeated over time, even in clinical trials that includes a small number of subjects.