Microscopic Simulation in Biology and Medicine

Abstract

Mathematical models are finding an increasing use in bio-medical scientific investigations as effective means of putting the interpretation of biological phenomena on a more quantitative basis. Besides the well established mathematical paradigm based on differential equations, another approach that takes full advantage of the steadily increasing computing power, is gaining increasing consensus: micro-simulation. Micro-simulation is based on the idea of mimicking the behavior of the system under investigation through the specification of the rules of interaction among its individual constituents. This rule-driven (sometimes called equation-free) approach allows a smoother upgrade of models sophistication and reduces the gap between the abstract level of description typical of mathematical models and the complexity of the biological world. In this article we aim at illustrating, through specific examples, some of the potential advantages that micro-simulation has to offer in order to gain a better grasp and understanding of complex phenomena in biology and medicine.

Cancer Cell Reprogramming: Stem Cell Differentiation Stage Factors and An Agent Based Model to Optimize Cancer Treatment

“…Besides a rapidly growing number of models applied to various problems, like the effect of intercellular signaling via the epidermal growth factor receptor on cell proliferation [105], the representation of acute inflammation [106], the proteinprotein interaction network [107], the intracellular chemical reactions [108], etc., there are two main streams of research into the applications of ABM in biology and medicine, cancer and immunology. This latter started quite early and nowadays several models of the whole immune system have been developed [109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120]. Here, we actually find representatives of the three categories of models just discussed.…”

“…Chen et al [121] study cancer cell motility focusing the ways to optimize the spatial search strategies, Zhang et al [127,128] propose a multi-scale tumor modeling platform that understands brain cancer, As concerning the basic structure and ingredients of a standard agent-based model built into the field of biology and medicine [110,111,125,129,130], the diverse types of agents, their behaviors (mechanisms of interaction), and their environment should be distinguished [103,131]. All these aspects are discussed in the next section with reference to our model that, placing at a quite abstract level of simulation, models the interactions of a population of tumor cells with a population of peptides and other regulatory molecules, like micro-RNA.…”