Immune System Diseases Commons^™

Mixture Models For Interval Censored Outcomes, Yibai Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

Silent events such as the first detectable HIV infection, the onset of Type 2 diabetes and prostate cancer progression are often ascertained by diagnostic tests and/or self-reports that are scheduled periodically. In such applications, we only observe the time to the event of interest to lie between the times of last negative and the first positive tests, resulting in interval-censored observations. In addition, in some medical studies, a substantial proportion of participants may experience the events before the study, so-called prevalent cases, or participants may never experience the event, that is regarded as non-susceptible cases (or indolent cancer or long-term …

Modulating T Cell Responses To Control Stromal Keratitis, Tamara Antia Veiga Parga

Doctoral Dissertations

Herpetic stromal keratitis (SK) is an immunoinflammatory corneal lesion caused by herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection. This infection, in some cases, can result in a chronic immunoinflammatory lesion that is the most common cause of infectious blindness in the developed world. Studies in animal models have revealed that SK lesions are orchestrated mainly by IFN-gamma producing CD4+ T cells (Th1) and neutrophils that infiltrate the corneal stroma.

The first part of this dissertation (I) reviews literature on HSV induced corneal SK immunopathology and the role of Tregs in viral infections. It also focuses on the understanding of HSV-1 induced immunoinflammatory …