Global dynamics of a diffusive and delayed viral infection model with cellular infection and nonlinear infection rate

A diffusive and delayed viral dynamics model which incorporates cell-to-cell transmission, cell-mediated immune responses and general nonlinear incidence is investigated. By constructing Lyapunov functionals, it is shown that the global threshold dynamics of the model is fully determined by the basic reproduction numbers of the virus and the immune response, R0 and R1. The result implies that both the basic reproduction number of the virus and the immune response might be underevaluated without considering either the virus-to-cell transmission or cell-to-cell transmission. The main results obtained in this paper extend some known results.