A model predictive control based scheduling method for HIV therapy

Recently developed models of the interaction of the human immune system and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) suggest the possibility of using interruptions of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) to simulate a therapeutic vaccine and induce cytotoxic lymphocyte (CTL) mediated control of HIV infection. We have developed a model predictive control (MPC) based method for determining optimal treatment interruption schedules for this purpose. This method provides a clinically implementable framework for calculating interruption schedules that are robust to errors due to measurement and patient variations. In this paper, we discuss the medical motivation for this work, introduce the MPC-based method, show simulation results, and discuss future work necessary to implement the method.