Combining Experiments with Multiscale Models to Understand and Manipulate Microvascular Growth and Remodeling

Departments: Biomedical Engineering
Time: Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Shayn Peirce-Cottler; Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia
Room/Office: Becton Seminar Room
Location:
Becton Seminar Room
15 Prospect St
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
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Yale University Department of Biomedical Engineering Seminar Series

“Combining Experiments with Multiscale Models to Understand and Manipulate Microvascular Growth and Remodeling”

Shayn Peirce-Cottler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
University of Virginia

Abstract: Vascular growth and remodeling requires the dynamic interplay between intra- and inter-signaling, various cell behaviors, and tissue-level changes that feedback on one another. As high-quality and high-throughput biological data at multiple different levels of spatial scale (gene through tissue) become increasingly available, we are tempted to define the cause-and-effect biological relationships that span across spatial scales with greater mechanistic detail. Doing so provides an opportunity to probe, for example, how receptor-ligand interactions in the membrane of one cell impact the migratory behaviors of a neighboring cell, and, ultimately the mechanical properties of a remodeling tissue—and vice versa. Because these relationships are often complex, dynamic, and spatially heterogeneous, it becomes useful to employ computational modeling approaches that integrate biological phenomena across spatial and temporal scales. Agent-based modeling (ABM) can simulate the behaviors of individual cells within a tissue and has recently been positioned as a linker to continuum models at both lower and higher levels of spatial scale. Our research has coupled ABM with continuum modeling approaches at lower and higher levels of biological scale, including molecular-level kinetics models of growth factor-ligand interactions and constrained mixture models of blood vessel biomechanics, respectively. I will describe some of our multiscale computational models of tissue growth and remodeling, the conceptual and technical challenges we have faced when coupling ABM with other computational modeling approaches, the types of multiscale simulation experiments that have offered new insight, and the experimental validation approaches we have used in these examples.

When: Thursday, November 13th, 2014
Place: Becton Seminar Room
Time: 4PM