Dynamic analysis of a cytokine-enhanced viral infection model with infection age

Recent studies reveal that pyroptosis is associated with the release of inflammatory cytokines which can attract more target cells to be infected. In this paper, a novel age-structured virus infection model incorporating cytokine-enhanced infection is investigated. The asymptotic smoothness of the semiflow is studied. With the help of characteristic equations and Lyapunov functionals, we have proved that both the local and global stabilities of the equilibria are completely determined by the threshold $ \mathcal{R}_0 $. The result shows that cytokine-enhanced viral infection also contributes to the basic reproduction number $ \mathcal{R}_0 $, implying that it may not be enough to eliminate the infection by decreasing the basic reproduction number of the model without considering the cytokine-enhanced viral infection mode. Numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the theoretical results.