processes
Article Mathematical Modeling of RNA Virus Sensing Pathways Reveals Paracrine Signaling as the Primary Factor Regulating Excessive Cytokine Production
Jordan J. A. Weaver 1 and Jason E. Shoemaker 1,2,3,*
1 Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; [email protected] 2 McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA 3 Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA * Correspondence: [email protected]
Received: 21 May 2020; Accepted: 17 June 2020; Published: 20 June 2020
Abstract: RNA viruses, such as influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), invoke excessive immune responses; however, the kinetics that regulate inflammatory responses within infected cells remain unresolved. Here, we develop a mathematical model of the RNA virus sensing pathways, to determine the intracellular events that primarily regulate interferon, an important protein for the activation and management of inflammation. Within the ordinary differential equation (ODE) model, we incorporate viral replication, cell death, interferon stimulated genes’ antagonistic effects on viral replication, and virus sensor protein (TLR and RIG-I) kinetics. The model is parameterized to influenza infection data using Markov chain Monte Carlo and then validated against infection data from an NS1 knockout strain of influenza, demonstrating that RIG-I antagonism significantly alters cytokine signaling trajectory. Global sensitivity analysis suggests that paracrine signaling is responsible for the majority of cytokine production, suggesting that rapid cytokine production may be best managed by influencing extracellular cytokine levels. As most of the model kinetics are host cell specific and not virus specific, the model presented provides an important step to modeling the intracellular immune dynamics of many RNA viruses, including the viruses responsible for SARS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).
Keywords: interferon signaling; systems biology; ODE modeling; cytokine storm
1. Introduction Respiratory infections are a constant threat to public health with deadly infections often characterized by cytokine storms, i.e., overly aggressive innate immune responses that result in severe, unnecessary lung tissue inflammation. Influenza causes an annual 3–5 million infections and 290,000–650,000 deaths [1]. The disease presents a significant pediatric burden, causing 374,000 annual hospitalizations of children under 1 year old, globally [2]. Currently, the new Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome of the novel Coronavirus (SARS-COV2), responsible for the disease COVID-19, has emerged, resulting in over 113,000 deaths in the US to date. Both influenza and SARS-COV2 are RNA viruses, and the data to date suggests that cytokine storms are a common feature of both viruses during severe infections [3]. Immune responses can help or hinder an organism’s ability to overcome an infection, and excessively, inflammatory responses, like cytokine storms, can cause greater tissue damage, higher mortality, and slow recovery [4,5]. Vaccination is effective for protecting public health against seasonal influenza; however, when new strains unexpectedly emerge, such as the 2009 novel pandemic H1N1 virus or the 2019 SARS-COV2 virus, new treatment strategies that can be implemented rapidly, and
Processes 2020, 8, 719; doi:10.3390/pr8060719 www.mdpi.com/journal/processes Processes 2020, 8, 719 2 of 16 preferably independently of the specific virus, are needed. Immunomodulatory treatments that aim to reduce inflammation while still managing virus growth are a promising approach to protecting against emergent disease, but several fundamental questions on how unnecessarily aggressive immune responses emerge remain unknown. Mathematical modeling can help quantify the kinetics of the interactions that define the immune system, revealing the interactions that are most likely to be responsible for unnecessarily aggressive responses and potential targets, to interfere with immunity to ensure healthy virus clearance. The first step to occur during an immune response is the detection of the pathogens, leading to the early, localized, innate immune response [6]. This response to viral infection leads to the production of type I interferons (IFNs). Interferons serve to establish an antiviral state by activating and inducing Mx proteins, RNA-activated protein kinase, and the 2-5A system [7]; they also regulate other immune responses, by acting on natural killer cells, T cells, B cells, dendritic cells, and phagocytic cells [8]. The presence of influenza virus is primarily sensed by cytoplasmic retinoic acid-inducible gene 1 (RIG-I) and endosomal Toll-like receptors 7 and 9 (TLR) [9,10]. RIG-I senses viral RNA in the cytoplasm [11], but is antagonized by many influenza A viruses’ nonstructural protein I (NS1) to varying, strain-specific magnitudes [12,13]. TLR7 is free of this antagonism [14,15], and is activated after the influenza envelope has been degraded by endosomal proteases. SARS-CoV’s N protein has been implicated in the inhibition of Type-I interferon production via antagonism of RIG-I [16,17]. This suggests RIG-I as a common viral sensor protein and a common target of antagonism for RNA viruses. The activation of either sensor leads to the phosphorylation of interferon regulatory factor 7 (IRF7, IRF7P) and the production of interferons (IFN), to act as a signaling cytokine. IFN induces secondary messenger molecules, ultimately leading to the induction of immune modulation and antiviral genes [18]. IFN is secreted from the infected cell and sensed through the Janus kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription pathway (JAK/STAT), in both an autocrine and paracrine manner. The JAK/STAT pathway leads to the induction of a broad family of IFN-stimulated antiviral genes [19], as well as the supplementary (autocrine) or novel (paracrine) production of IFN. These IFN-stimulated genes cause cell death through apoptosis, necroptosis and pyroptosis [20], slow viral replication within the cell [21], regulate the infiltration and activity of key innate immune cells to clear the infection, and help initiate the adaptive immune response [22]. The current models of innate immune response to RNA virus infection lack major intracellular components or lack important biological interactions, limiting their applicability to understanding how severe inflammation emerges. Extensive molecular pathway maps exist [6,23], but they currently lack mathematical description to support simulating the immune response. Some models of the intracellular innate immune response have incorporated RIG-I and TLR activity, but consider their effect to be constant, independent of the viral load, and the models are inherently unstable, complicating their use [24,25]. These models used ordinary differential equations (ODEs), a common approach in systems biology, after their demonstrable success in analyzing the robustness of biological signaling [26–28], the highly dynamic behaviors of NF-kB [29], and ultrasensitive cell fate binary responses [30]. ODEs allow for interpolation of the dynamics between a finite number of time points at which data has been measured, based on hypotheses of the mechanisms regulating the system’s components. In this study, we construct a novel ODE model to simulate the intracellular innate immune response of human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs) to influenza A infection and use the model to determine the interactions that most affect cytokine production. This model was constructed with computational expense for parameterization and eventual agent based model implementation in mind, with a minimum number of ODE’s and parameters that capture the dynamics of interest. The model is numerically stable under realistic conditions and non-stiff, enhancing its reproducibility and reducing computational cost. The model incorporates a viral growth model [31] and the proportionality of sensor protein activity to vRNA levels in the cytoplasm, the first such integration of cell dynamics and viral replication. The feedback of interferon production on viral replication through the interferon stimulated gene (ISG) family [32] is included. A literature search for data to perform parameterization Processes 2020, 8, 719 3 of 16 produced viral titers [33,34] and the time-series of RNA data in HBECs [35]. RNA data originated from Shapira et al.’s 2009 work elucidating a network of viral-host interactions via genome wide expression profiling. Viral titers came from Ramos et al.’s 2013 work on the polyadenylation stimulating factor 30 (CPSF30) binding function of the NS1 protein. These consist of subsets, in which competing, parallel pathways were inhibited, allowing for improved identifiability of the model parameters; first, a wild-type A/Puerto Rico/8/1934 Influenza A (PR8) infection, in which RIG-I is assumed fully antagonized and TLR is fully active; and second, an NS1 knockout PR8 strain which has both TLR and RIG-I activity [35]. The antagonism of RIG-I in wild-type PR8 infection is shown to drastically alter infection outcomes. Additionally, some parameters were sourced from or bounded by their respective values in previous models. This work establishes the first cell-level model of interferon signaling induced by influenza infection that can be used to compare host responses between infections with different influenza viruses, antagonism motifs and different RNA viruses. Paracrine signaling is demonstrated to produce the majority of HBEC’s cytokine response to influenza infection, while the initial sensor protein pathways are shown to serve as an ignition for said paracrine signaling.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Model Construction Upon initial viral entry to the cell, there is an eclipse phase, during which the virus enters the cell, traffics to the nucleus, and starts the replication process [36]. Analogously, a whole-organism infection with influenza A observes an eclipse phase before significant viral titers and immune response are seen [32,37]. As the virus replicates within the cell, the concentrations of single-stranded viral RNA (vRNA) and NS1 in the cytoplasm rise until cell death. Intuitively, the magnitude of action of the sensor protein TLR should increase proportionally to the vRNA levels. RIG-I’s activity level will also be proportional to the vRNA level, but inversely proportional to the NS1 concentration. A model of IFN production, virus sensing, and JAK/STAT feedback was built to reflect these mechanisms. The initial model was unstable; such models fail to capture important aspects of the dynamics of shutdown and steady-state transitions. The complete model had degradation rates for environmental type-I interferons (IFNe), interferon regulatory factor 7 and its phosphorylated form (IRF7, IRF7P) added to assist in stability. For each modeled interaction, mass action was assumed if no other information was available on the reaction kinetics, unless an existing literature model had specific evidence for the representation of the step in some other form, in order to maintain a minimum number of parameters. The IFN Hill type kinetic was selected based on in vivo data from mice, which showed that IFN has an ultrasensitive response to viral load. Equations (7) and (8) were added to incorporate the classical model of virus kinetics [31,32], to model virus concentration within the cell, infected cell counts, and type-I interferons’ effects on viral replication. The use of viral counts, [V], in Equation (2), makes the sensor proteins’ actions proportional to virus level. RIG-I’s action is modeled as a mass-action kinetic, while TLR is modeled separately, as a Hill-type kinetic. All Type-I Interferons are considered indistinguishable in the complete model, as are the different STAT species. The transport of interferons from the cytoplasm to the extracellular space is now represented with a first-order mass transfer kinetic. Qiao et al. [24] implemented Michaelis–Menten (MM) for this transport step; this was rejected due to a lack of evidence for any specific MM-type mechanism, and the redundancy of limiting maximum IFN concentrations with the introduction of degradation rates. Finally, the binding of interferons and the activation of the JAK/STAT pathway [24,25] was reduced to constants in a form reminiscent of a Hill kinetic. The production of cellular species were made proportional to the living cell population, [P].
2.2. Data Sources Three primary literature sources were used for data to estimate model parameters. First, micro array gene expression data [35] of two influenza strain (PR8 and an NS1-knockout PR8) time-course Processes 2020, 8, 719 4 of 16 experiments in human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs) were used to fit IFN, STATP, and IRF7 gene expression. Second, viral titers of wild-type PR8 influenza in human lung adenocarcinoma epithelial (A549) cells [34] and NS1-knockout PR8 [33] were used to fit viral titers. Viral titers would ideally be obtained with the same cell type, time points, and infection methodology as the micro-array data; however, the immune response similarity of A549 cells and HBECs [38] justifies this approach.
2.3. ODE Simulation and Sensitivity Analysis Julia v1.3 was used to simulate the ODE model with the DifferentialEquations v6.11.0, ParameterizedFunctions v4.2.1, and DiffEqParamEstim v1.12.0 packages. The ODE system is solved with the non-stiff solver VERN7. A Sobol method global sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine the degree of control that each parameter exerted on the system. Julia’s DiffEqSensitivity v6.7.0 was used for this analysis.
2.4. Model Parameterization Since the ODE system relies on 15 unknown parameters, simple regression methods are insufficient to successfully parameterize the model. Instead, a parallel temping Markov chain Monte Carlo method (PT MCMC) was implemented in Julia v1.3. To initialize the parameters, a literature search and manual fitting methods were conducted. The literature search provided estimated decay rates for STATP [39], IRF7 [40], and IRF7P [41]. A manual fitting gave estimates and stability-based bounds for cell death (k61), viral replication (k71), and nonspecific viral clearance (k73) rates. Estimates from the Qiao model [24] were used to initialize the remaining parameters. Since parallel tempering results in faster convergence than single-chain methodologies [42], PT MCMC was run with 1 million iterations with three parallel chains, for a total of three million samples per fitting attempt. The sum squared error minimized by the MCMC was:
XSm XT1 2 XT2 2 SSE = (Oij Nij) + n (Ek Vk) , (1) i=1 j=1 − k=1 −
The left-hand portion of the objective function determines the error of the system dynamics, where Oij is the experimentally observed log-fold change of Species i at Time j [35], relative to a control RNA level of the same species and time point. Two points from biological replicates are available for each i,j pair. Intracellular interferon and IRF7 were directly tracked by their RNA levels. Because phosphorylated STAT cannot be measured using microarray, the RNA levels of Interferon-induced GTP-binding Protein Mx1 (MX1), which is induced primarily by the action of STATP [6], were used as a proxy for STATP levels. Next, n is a weighting factor. Ek is the normalized literature viral titer estimate at Time k [33], and Vk is the normalized calculated viral titer at Time k.
2.5. Structural Identifiability The structural identifiability of an ODE system is a prerequisite to parameter estimation and the subsequent application of the model. A common problem in ODE representations of biological systems is a lack of identifiable parameters, leading to non-unique parameter sets [43]. Structural identifiability analyses were carried out with structural identifiability taken as extended-generalized observability with lie derivatives and decomposition [44] (STRIKE-GOLLD) in MATLAB R2019a. These analyses were done under two sets of conditions—perfect identifiability and practical identifiability. Under perfect identifiability conditions, all seven species are assumed to be perfectly observed (i.e., measured directly by experiment). Under practical identifiability, only IFN, STATP, IRF7, Cells, and Virus were considered to be observable, which reflects the availability of data under which the model was trained. Structural identifiability results are available in AppendixA. Processes 2020, 8, 719 5 of 16
2.6. Interparameter Correlation Parameter correlation in MCMC training results was tested using Pearson’s correlation coefficient from SciPy v1.4.1 in Python 3.6.8. Significant correlations were considered as those with a correlation Processescoefficient 2020,> 8, x 0.5FOR [ 45PEER]. REVIEW 5 of 16 ± 3.3. Results Results
3.1.3.1. ODE ODE Model Model TheThe model consists ofof sevenseven ordinary ordinary di differentiafferential equationsl equations (states) (states) with with three three fixed fixed parameters parameters and and15 unknown 15 unknown parameters. parameters. The complete The complete model ismodel given is in given Equations in Equations (2)–(8) and (2)–(8) illustrated and graphicallyillustrated graphicallyin Figure1. in Figure 1.
FigureFigure 1. 1. SchematicSchematic of of intracellular intracellular immune immune signaling signaling sy system.stem. Crossed Crossed red red circle circless represent represent decay decay or or death,death, straightstraight blackblack arrows arrows represent represent positive positive interactions interactions and the an circle-cappedd the circle-ca blackpped arrow black represents arrow representsantagonism antagonism through Interferon through Stimulated Interferon Genes Stim (ISGs).ulated Blue Genes boxes (ISGs). are proteins Blue (Environmentalboxes are proteins type-I (EnvironmentalInterferons (IFNe), type-I Toll-Like Interferons Receptor (IFNe), 7 (TLR7), Toll-Like Retinoic Receptor Acid-Inducible 7 (TLR7), Retinoic Gene I (RIGI), Acid-Inducible phosphorylated Gene ISignal (RIGI), Transducer phosphorylated and Activator Signal Transducer of Transcription and (STATP)Activator and of Transcription Interferon Regulatory (STATP) Factor and Interferon 7 (IRF7P)). RegulatoryGreen boxes Factor are RNA 7 (IRF7P)). species Green (Type-I boxes Interferons are RNA (IFN) species and (Type-I Interferon Interferons Regulatory (IFN) Factor and Interferon 7 (IRF7)). RegulatoryThe gold oval Factor is the7 (IRF7)). normalized The Humangold oval Bronchial is the normalized EpithelialCell Human population. Bronchial The Epithelial red hexagon Cell population.represents a The normalized red hexagon viral repres titer. ents a normalized viral titer.