We provide well-posedness results for nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) given by reaction–diffusion equations describing the concentration of oxygen in encapsulated cells. The cells are described in terms of a core and a shell, which introduces a discontinuous diffusion coefficient as the material properties of the core and shell differ. In addition, the cells are subject to general nonlinear consumption of oxygen. As no monotonicity condition is imposed on the consumption, monotone operator theory cannot be used. Moreover, the discontinuity in the diffusion coefficient bars us from applying classical results on strong solutions. However, by directly applying a Galerkin method, we obtain uniqueness and existence of the strong form solution. These results provide the basis to study the dynamics of cells in critical states.

We consider the Cauchy problem for a general class of parabolic partial differential equations in the Euclidean space ℝN. We show that given a weighted Lp-space $L_w^p({\mathbb {R}}^N)$ with 1 ⩽ p < ∞ and a fast growing weight w, there is a Schauder basis $(e_n)_{n=1}^\infty$ in $L_w^p({\mathbb {R}}^N)$ with the following property: given an arbitrary positive integer m there exists nm > 0 such that, if the initial data f belongs to the closed linear span of en with n ⩾ nm, then the decay rate of the solution of the problem is at least t−m for large times t.

The result generalizes the recent study of the authors concerning the classical linear heat equation. We present variants of the result having different methods of proofs and also consider finite polynomial decay rates instead of unlimited m.