Analysis of Hepatitis B Virus Dynamics and Its Impact on Antiviral Development

Viral dynamics is the study of the population dynamics of viral infection within the body of an infected individual. It describes how viruses spread from cell to cell, with the aim of revealing the basic laws that govern the spread of the virus within the host, their interaction with the immune system, and their response to therapy. For viruses that produce a viremia, changes in the size of the virus population can be measured and followed from blood samples obtained by phlebotomy at various time intervals using very sensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based assays to quantify viral nucleic acids accurately over a dynamic range of six orders of magnitude.