The role of local kinetics in a three-component chemotaxis model for Alopecia areata (Q2242552)

The authors study the chemotaxis system \[\begin{cases} u_t = \Delta u - \chi_1 \nabla \cdot (u \nabla w) + w - \mu_1 u^2, & \quad (x,t) \in \Omega \times (0,\infty), \\ v_t = \Delta v - \chi_2 \nabla \cdot (v \nabla w) + w + r uv - \mu_2 v^2, & \quad (x,t) \in \Omega \times (0,\infty), \\ w_t = \Delta w +u +v -w, & \quad (x,t) \in \Omega \times (0,\infty), \end{cases} \] endowed with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions and nonnegative initial conditions \(u_0, v_0 \in C^0 (\overline{\Omega})\), \(w_0 \in W^{1,\infty} (\Omega)\) such that \(u_0 \not\equiv 0\), where \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n\), \(n \in \{ 2,3 \}\), is a bounded domain with smooth boundary, \(\chi_1, \chi_2, \mu_1, \mu_2 >0\), and \(r \ge 0\). The system describes the autoimmune disease Alopecia areata, where \(u\) and \(v\) denote the densities of specific immune cells, namely CD\(4^+\) and CD\(8^+\) T cells, respectively, while \(w\) denotes the concentration of the chemoattractant interferon-gamma. Both types of T cells move by diffusion and chemotaxis, are activated by the chemicals and have a density-dependent death rate. In addition, CD\(8^+\) T cells proliferate by interaction with CD\(4^+\) T cells described by the term \(+ r uv\) in the second equation which appears rarely in chemotaxis models. The authors prove the existence of a bounded classical solution which is uniformly bounded in \(\Omega \times (0,\infty)\), where in dimension \(n=3\) it is assumed in addition that \(\Omega\) is convex and that \(\mu_i\) is large as compared to \(\chi_i\) and \(r\) for \(i=1,2\). Moreover, the authors prove that for a certain parameter regime, including in particular the smallness of \(\chi_1\) and \(\chi_2\) and the choice \(r= \mu_2 - \mu_1\), the unique positive constant steady state \((u_\ast, v_\ast, w_\ast) = (\frac{2}{\mu_1}, \frac{2}{\mu_1}, \frac{4}{\mu_1})\) is globally asymptotically stable with respect to the \((L^\infty (\Omega))^3\) norm. The proofs of the global existence results mainly rely on several a priori estimates which are combined in a clever way, while the main ingredient of the asymptotic stability result is the construction of an appropriate Lyapunov functional.