An HIV latent infection model with cell-to-cell transmission and stochastic perturbation

Abstract

During the HIV infection process in vitro cell cultures, recent experimental and mathematical investigations have revealed that there are two fundamentally distinct viral transmission modes: cell-free infection and cell-to-cell transmission. A stochastic HIV model with latent infection, cell-free infection and cell-to-cell transmission is formulated in this paper. The existence of the unique ergodic stationary distribution is established by constructing appropriate Lyapunov function. Moreover, virus can be eradicated under certain sufficient conditions. Numerical simulations are carried out to investigate three aspects: (i) the effect of stochastic perturbation; (ii) the influence of latency; (iii) the relative contributions of cell-to-cell and cell-free infections.