HCV Transmission Modeling to Evaluate Long-term Strategies Toward Elimination

With the advent of highly effective HCV treatments, there is rising interest in comparative evaluation of strategies that combine HCV prevention, testing, linkage to care, and treatment, toward the end of eventual elimination in the US. A range of simulation models have been used to examine different HCV policies. Many models have used relatively simple designs and assumptions relating to transmission dynamics, making them poorly suited to estimating treatment effects on incidence; or they have included more detailed characterizations of networks of drug users but adopted relatively short time horizons and limited detail relevant to HCV testing, linkage, and treatment.

An integrated model will be developed that combines the advantages of these two distinct emphases in comparable models, operationalized as an agent-based simulation model of a network of injection drug users, linked to our existing simulation of HCV testing, linkage to care, and treatment.