Effect of cellular reservoirs and delays on the global dynamics of HIV

Abstract

Abstract We investigate general HIV infection models with three types of infected cells: latently infected cells, long-lived productively infected cells, and short-lived productively infected cells. We incorporate three discrete or distributed time delays into the models. Moreover, we consider the effect of humoral immunity on the dynamical behavior of the HIV. The HIV-target incidence rate, production/proliferation, and removal rates of the cells and HIV are represented by general nonlinear functions. We show that the solutions of the proposed model are nonnegative and ultimately bounded. We derive two threshold parameters which fully determine the existence and stability of the three steady states of the model. Using Lyapunov functionals, we establish the global stability of the steady states of the model. The theoretical results are confirmed by numerical simulations.

Keywords

• HIV infection
• HAART
• Global stability
• Humoral immune response
• Latency
• Viral reservoirs