Related papers: Finite element simulation of the structural integr…
The formation of gaps in the endothelium is a crucial process underlying both cancer and immune cell extravasation, contributing to the functioning of the immune system during infection, the unfavorable development of chronic inflammation…
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
In cell extrusion, a cell embedded in an epithelial monolayer loses its apical or basal surface and is subsequently squeezed out of the monolayer by neighboring cells. Cell extrusions occur during apoptosis, epithelial-mesenchymal…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Effects of mechanical stress on the permeability of vascular endothelium are important to normal physiology and may be critical in the development of atherosclerosis, where they can account for the patchy arterial distribution of the…
One of the most crucial and lethal characteristics of solid tumors is represented by the increased ability of cancer cells to migrate and invade other organs during the so-called metastatic spread. This is allowed thanks to the production…
Cancer cell invasion is recognised as one of the hallmarks of cancer and involves several inner-related multiscale processes that ultimately contribute to its spread into the surrounding tissue. In order to gain a deeper understanding of…
Metastases are the primary cause of death in cancer patients. Small animal models are helping in dissecting some of key features in the metastatic cascade. Yet, tools for systematically analyze the contribution of blood flow, vascular…
The ability to locally degrade the extracellular matrix (ECM) and interact with the tumour microenvironment is a key process distinguishing cancer from normal cells, and is a critical step in the metastatic spread of the tumour. The…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
In embryogenesis, epithelial cells, acting as individual entities or as coordinated aggregates in a tissue, exhibit strong coupling between chemical signalling and mechanical responses to internally or externally applied stresses.…
Experiments and theory have shown that cell monolayers and epithelial tissues exhibit solid-liquid and glass-liquid transitions. These transitions are biologically relevant to our understanding of embryonic development, wound healing, and…
Angiogenesis is the complex process by which new blood vessels develop from an existing vasculature in order to supply nutrients and/or metabolites to tissues, playing a fundamental role in many physiological and pathological conditions…
Metabolic substrates, such as oxygen and glucose, are rapidly delivered to the cell through filtration across microvessels walls. Modelling this important process is complicated by the coupling between flow and transport equations, which…
Coordinated motion of cell monolayers during epithelial wound healing and tissue morphogenesis involves mechanical stress generation. Here we propose a model for the dynamics of epithelial expansion that couples mechanical deformations in…
Cell monolayers and epithelial tissues display slow dynamics during the liquid-glass transitions, a phenomenon with direct relevance to embryogenesis, tumor metastases, and wound healing. In active cells, persistent motion and cell…
Endothelial cells are responsible for the formation of the capillary blood vessel network. We describe a system of endothelial cells by means of two-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of point-like particles. Cells' motion is…
In this work, we present a coupled 3D-1D model of solid tumor growth within a dynamically changing vascular network to facilitate realistic simulations of angiogenesis. Additionally, the model includes erosion of the extracellular matrix,…
The spread of metastases is a crucial process in which some questions remain unanswered. In this work, we focus on tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream, the so-called Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs). Our aim is to characterize their…
We analyse a multi-phase field model for an epithelial monolayer with pairwise adhesions between neighbouring cells following an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, representing the stochastic turnover of junctional molecular motors. These…