According to the figures provided by the United Nations, there are approximately 40 million people who are infected with the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) by the end of 2004. AIDS is a disease for which the body immune system is attacked by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) so that it cannot protect the body against the invasion of foreign viruses. This results in the breakdown of immune response in the body, finally patients are died of some minor infectious diseases, such as normal influenza.

Although AIDS is no longer a deadly disease due to advanced medication, patients still need to be suffering several drawbacks from the traditional treatment, such as severe side-effects, high medication cost and the resistance of virus to the drugs. Thus many patients quit the treatment and hence increasing the death rates. This leads to the search of other possible and better medical treatment.

Recently, some researchers are studying the treatment of AIDS from an engineering perspective. A control scheme, known as Model Predictive Control (MPC), is currently introduced to the research. Results from it show that it is possible to model the treatment by the MPC-based scheme, since it is proved by simulations that patients will no longer require to take any medication after the treatment, and the immune response is to be restored as a result. This is an important finding because duration of the existing treatment is life-long, patients need to continue the treatment once it has been started.

The group aims to reproduce and study the results from those researches, and try to make some possible and effective improvements to the existing scheme so as to make some meaningful contributions in this area. The group hopes their limited findings in this project can actually help those patients who are currently infected with AIDS so that they can be totally cured and enjoying the life.

Kaye Sham, Associate Professor Dragan Nesic, Ning Ma, Danny Wan