Dynamics of an HBV infection model with cell-to-cell transmission and CTL immune response

In this work, we propose a mathematical model to describe the dynamics of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection by taking into account the cure of infected cells, the export of precursor cytotoxic T lympho-cytes (CTL) cells from the thymus and both modes of transmission that are the virus-to-cell infection and the cell-to-cell transmission. The local stability of the disease-free equilibrium and the chronic infection equilibrium is obtained via characteristic equations. Furthermore, the global stability of both equilibria is established by using two techniques, the direct Lyapunov method for the disease-free equilibrium and the geometrical approach for the chronic infection equilibrium.