Report on the spatial spread of defective interfering particles and its role in suppressing infectious particles

Defective interfering particles (DIPs) are categorized as non-infectious viruses with large deletions in their genomic material. A cell infected by a DIP require co-infection by a wild-type virus to complete its replicative lifecycle. There is an increasing interest in developing DIP based therapies in the form of molecular parasites that steal genetic resources of infectious particles. This parasitic behavior is enhanced by constructing engineering designs of DIPs to optimize their role in suppressing the virus infection within-host. Recent experimental studies characterize viral infection as a spatial process and emphasize on its spread rate and the area populated by the infectious particles (IPs). We developed a spatio-temporal model in the framework of reaction-diffusion equations to depict the functional organization of virus particles distributed over a tissue surface. Our model investigates the scenarios and figures out the aspects that can play a vital role to suppress the infection within-host. We studied the impact of initial dose of DIPs, the efficiency of DIP production and the role of cell maturation. Our results show that an engineered DIP can substantially decrease the concentration of IPs. We assert that the decrease in the rate of spatial spread of IPs requires non-deterministic settings.