Autonomous Targeting of Infectious Superspreaders Using Engineered Transmissible Therapies

Metzger, Vincent T.; Lloyd-Smith, James O.; Weinberger, Leor S.

The resulting high cost and effort involved in identifying highrisk populations has meant that-despite the huge potential benefits-targeting of disease control measures to high-risk populations is often not feasible in practice [14] . Here, we propose a fundamentally different approach that obviates the need to directly identify high-risk populations by engineering a therapeutic version of interfering particles (i.e. TIPs) that spread between individuals to autonomously target high-risk groups. The results demonstrate the potential of TIPs to control HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and we benchmark the performance of TIPs against the more familiar alternatives of antiretroviral therapy (ART), which is known to effectively reduce HIV incidence and prevalence, and a hypothetical protective vaccine against HIV. We further demonstrate that the effect of TIPs is complementary to ART programs, so our proposed therapy could be rolled out synergistically with current campaigns.