Analysis of an age structured HIV infection model with virus-to-cell infection and cell-to-cell transmission

Recent studies reveal that cell-to-cell transmission via formation of virological synapses can contribute significantly to virus spread, and hence, may play a more important role than virus-to-cell infection in some situations. Age-structured models can be employed to study the variations w.r.t. infection age in modeling the death rate and virus production rate of infected cells. Considering the above characteristics for within-host dynamics of HIV, in this paper, we formulate an age-structured hybrid model to explore the effects of the two infection modes in viral production and spread. We offer a rigorous analysis for the model, including addressing the relative compactness and persistence of the solution semiflow, and existence of a global attractor. By subtle construction and estimates of Lyapunov functions, we show that the global attractor actually consists of an singleton, being either the infection free steady state if the basic reproduction number is less than one, or the infection steady state if the basic reproduction number is larger than one.