Spatiotemporal dynamics of a fractional model for hepatitis B virus infection with cellular immunity

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and investigate a fractional diffusive model for hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection with capsids and immune response presented by cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) cells. We derive the conditions for global asymptotic stability of the steady states of the model in terms of the basic reproduction number R0 and the immune response reproduction number R1. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov functionals, it is shown that the infection-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable when R0 ≤ 1, the immune-free infection equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable when R1 ≤ 1 < R0 and the infection equilibrium with CTL immune response is globally asymptotically stable when R1 > 1. Numerical simulations are performed to illustrate the analytical results.