Global Stability and Hopf Bifurcation in a Delayed Viral Infection Model with Cell-to-Cell Transmission and Humoral Immune Response

Abstract

We have developed a class of viral infection model with cell-to-cell transmission and humoral immune response. The model addresses both immune and intracellular delays. We also constructed Lyapunov functionals to establish the global dynamical properties of the equilibria. Theoretical results indicate that considering only two intracellular delays did not affect the dynamical behavior of the model, but incorporating an immune delay greatly affects the dynamics, i.e. an immune delay may destabilize the immunity-activated equilibrium and lead to Hopf bifurcation, oscillations and stability switches. Our results imply that an immune delay dominates the intracellular delays in the model. We also investigated the direction of the Hopf bifurcation and the stability of the periodic solutions by applying normal form and center manifold theory, and investigated the existence of global Hopf bifurcation by regarding the immune delay as a bifurcation parameter. Numerical simulations are carried out to support the analytical conclusions.