Cancer is a complex disease process that spans multiple scales in space and time. Driven by cutting-edge mathematical and computational techniques, in silico biology provides powerful tools to investigate the mechanistic relationships of genes, cells, and tissues. It enables the creation of experimentally testable hypotheses, the integration of dat

Mathematical modeling, analysis and simulation are set to play crucial roles in explaining tumor behavior, and the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells over multiple time and spatial scales. This book, the first to integrate state-of-the-art numerical techniques with experimental data, provides an in-depth assessment of tumor cell modeling at multiple scales. The first part of the text presents a detailed biological background with an examination of single-phase and multi-phase continuum tumor modeling, discrete cell modeling, and hybrid continuum-discrete modeling. In the final two chapters, the authors guide the reader through problem-based illustrations and case studies of brain and breast cancer, to demonstrate the future potential of modeling in cancer research. This book has wide interdisciplinary appeal and is a valuable resource for mathematical biologists, biomedical engineers and clinical cancer research communities wishing to understand this emerging field.

This work shows how the cellular Potts model can be used as a framework for model building and how extended models can achieve even better biological practicality, accuracy, and predictive power. It focuses on ways to integrate and interface the basic cellular Potts model at the mesoscopic scale with approaches that accurately model microscopic dynamics. These extensions are designed to create a nested and hybrid environment, where the evolution of a biological system is realistically driven by the constant interplay and flux of information between the different levels of description.

Ubiquitous and fundamental in cell mechanics, multiscale problems can arise in the growth of tumors, embryogenesis, tissue engineering, and more. Cell Mechanics: From Single Scale-Based Models to Multiscale Modeling brings together new insight and research on mechanical, mathematical, physical, and biological approaches for simulating the behavior

This book presents and discusses the state of the art and future perspectives in mathematical modeling and homogenization techniques with the focus on addressing key physiological issues in the context of multiphase healthy and malignant biological materials. The highly interdisciplinary content brings together contributions from scientists with complementary areas of expertise, such as pure and applied mathematicians, engineers, and biophysicists. The book also features the lecture notes from a half-day introductory course on asymptotic homogenization. These notes are suitable for undergraduate mathematics or physics students, while the other chapters are aimed at graduate students and researchers.

Martin Oliver Steinhauser deals with several aspects of multiscale materials modeling and simulation in applied materials research and fundamental science. He covers various multiscale modeling approaches for high-performance ceramics, biological bilayer membranes, semi-flexible polymers, and human cancer cells. He demonstrates that the physics of shock waves, i.e., the investigation of material behavior at high strain rates and of material failure, has grown to become an important interdisciplinary field of research on its own. At the same time, progress in computer hardware and software development has boosted new ideas in multiscale modeling and simulation. Hence, bridging the length and time scales in a theoretical-numerical description of materials has become a prime challenge in science and technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, BICoB 2007, held in New Orleans, LA, USA, in April 2007. The 30 revised full papers presented together with 10 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 initial submissions. The papers address current research in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology fostering the advancement of computing techniques and their application to life sciences in topics such as genome analysis sequence analysis, phylogenetics, structural bioinformatics, analysis of high-throughput biological data, genetics and population analysis, as well as systems biology.

This volume – for pharmacologists, systems biologists, philosophers and historians of medicine – points to investigate new avenues in pharmacology research, by providing a full assessment of the premises underlying a radical shift in the pharmacology paradigm. The pharmaceutical industry is currently facing unparalleled challenges in developing innovative drugs. While drug-developing scientists in the 1990s mostly welcomed the transformation into a target-based approach, two decades of experience shows that this model is failing to boost both drug discovery and efficiency. Selected targets were often not druggable and with poor disease linkage, leading to either high toxicity or poor efficacy. Therefore, a profound rethinking of the current paradigm is needed. Advances in systems biology are revealing a phenotypic robustness and a network structure that strongly suggest that exquisitely selective compounds, compared with multitarget drugs, may exhibit lower than desired clinical efficacy. This appreciation of the role of polypharmacology has significant implications for tackling the two major sources of attrition in drug development, efficacy and toxicity. Integrating network biology and polypharmacology holds the promise of expanding the current opportunity space for druggable targets.

This collection of selected chapters offers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art mathematical methods and tools for modeling and analyzing cancer phenomena. Topics covered include stochastic evolutionary models of cancer initiation and progression, tumor cords and their response to anticancer agents, and immune competition in tumor progression and prevention. The complexity of modeling living matter requires the development of new mathematical methods and ideas. This volume, written by first-rate researchers in the field of mathematical biology, is one of the first steps in that direction.

Mechanobiology: From Molecular Sensing to Disease will provide a review of the current state of understanding of mechanobiology and its role in health and disease. It covers: Current understanding of the main molecular pathways by which cells sense and respond to mechanical stimuli, A review of diseases that with known or purported mechanobiological underpinnings; The role of mechanobiology in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine; Experimental methods to capture mechanobiological phenomena; Computational models in mechanobiology. - Presents our current understanding of the main molecular pathways by which cells sense and respond to mechanical stimuli - Provides a review of diseases with known or purported mechanobiological underpinnings - Includes the role of mechanobiology in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine - Covers experimental methods to capture mechanobiological phenomena