Dynamics of a PDE viral infection model incorporating cell-to-cell transmission (Q739544)

The authors investigate the global dynamics of a model for viral infection accounting for cell-to-cell transmission and spatial heterogeneity. It is formulated as a coupled system of two ODEs for the densities of the uninfected cells \(u_1\) and infected cells \(u_2\) and one PDE for the free viruses \(u_3\). A variational charaterization for the basic reproduction number \(\mathcal{R}_0\) is given (a threshold value that determines whether the infection will die out or spread in the population). Using suitable Lyapunov functionals it is shown that the infection-free steady state is globally asymptotically stable if \(\mathcal{R}_0\leq 1\), while the system is uniformly persistent and the infection steady state is globally asymptotically stable if \(\mathcal{R}_0>1\). Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the results.