Global properties of an age-structured virus model with saturated antibody immune response, multi-target cells and general incidence rate

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a complex virus model incorporating infection age, multiple target cell types, and immune response saturation, revealing how key reproductive numbers govern the global infection dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel age-structured virus model with multiple cell types and saturation effects, providing a comprehensive analysis of its global behavior.

Findings

Global dynamics determined by basic reproduction numbers

Lyapunov functionals establish stability conditions

Model captures effects of immune saturation and infection age

Abstract

Some viruses, such as human immunodeficiency virus, can infect several types of cell populations. The age of infection can also affect the dynamics of infected cells and production of viral particles. In this work, we study a virus model with infection-age and different types of target cells which takes into account the saturation effect in antibody immune response and a general non-linear infection rate. We construct suitable Lyapunov functionals to show that the global dynamics of the model is completely determined by two critical values: the basic reproduction number of virus and the reproductive number of antibody response.