Integrated Downstream Analysis and Epidemiological Modelling of Hantavirus Infection: From Host Transcriptomics to Transmission Dynamics

作者：Pietro Hiram Guzzi, Francesco Branda, Fabio Scarpa, Giancarlo Ceccarelli, Massimo Ciccozzi, Federico Manuel Giorgi, Pierangelo Veltri · 发表于：Pathogens · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.3390/pathogens15060601 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Viral Infections and Vectors、Mosquito-borne diseases and control、Physiological and biochemical adaptations

Hantaviruses are emerging zoonotic pathogens responsible for two severe clinical syndromes: (i) haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and (ii) hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), collectively causing more than 200,000 human cases annually worldwide. Despite their public-health importance, the molecular mechanisms governing the host response and the population-level dynamics of rodent-to-human spillover remain incompletely characterised. The timeliness of this framework is underscored by the April–May 2026 outbreak of Andes orthohantavirus aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship, the first such cluster in a maritime setting, with three deaths reported across multiple countries. This event revealed critical gaps in existing models that treat humans solely as dead-end spillover hosts. Our coupled Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-Dead (SEIRD) model assumes no human-to-human transmission and is therefore designed for hantavirus strains where spillover does not lead to secondary human cases, specifically Hantaan virus (HTNV), Puumala virus (PUUV), Sin Nombre virus (SNV), and Dobrava-Belgrade virus (DOBV). The Andes virus (ANDV) outbreak aboard the MV Hondius is used as a real-world case study to assess the boundaries of our model and to motivate future extensions, not as a direct validation target for its quantitative predictions. Here, we present an integrated computational study combining three complementary analyses. First, we performed a preliminary phylogenet...