VPH NoE Exemplar Projects and the VPH ToolKit - 11. Vascular Tissue Modeling Environment (VTME) PDF | Print | E-mail

11: "Vascular Tissue Modeling Environment (VTME)"

Coordinator: Markus Owen, University of Nottingham

Partners: Oxford University; CRM, Barcelona; Charité, Berlin; Physiology, U of Arizona, Tucson; Textensor Ltd., Edinburgh; Arizona State, Tempe; Neuroscience, Physiol. & Pharmacol, UCL

Throughout life, almost all tissues require a blood supply to deliver nutrients and remove waste products. Problems with blood vessel development can lead to severe birth defects. Later, vascular growth and remodeling play a key role in pathologies including diabetes, macular degeneration and rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, tumor growth is crucially dependent on the host blood supply, and this has made the vascular system a major target for anti-cancer therapies. These features make patient-specific computer models of vascular tissues a natural target for the VPH. Over a number of years a multiscale model for vascular tissues has been developed by the EP11 team as part of projects funded by the EU (FP5, FP6), the UK (BBSRC, EPSRC), German (BMBF) and US (NCI/NIH) research councils. The model combines (A) fluid flow in a vessel network; (B) PDEs for the transport, release and uptake of diffusible substances such as oxygen; (C) cell division and reinforced random walks of cells on a regular lattice; (D) ODEs for subcellular networks that regulate the cell cycle and growth factors such as VEGF; and (E) integration of angiogenic and vasculogenic endothelial cells into the vascular network. The model (Owen et al. 2011, Cancer Research 71(8); Perfahl et al. 2011, PLoS ONE 6(4)) is at a stage of maturity that makes it ideal for a VPH NoE Exemplar Project, in order to reinforce these developments, and to enable re-use, integration and sharing of the model and relevant data.

EP11 will implement a user-friendly Vascular Tissue Modeling Environment (VTME) within the "Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment" tool (CHASTE, http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ chaste/), already part of the VPH ToolKit (http://toolkit.vph-noe.eu/). VTME will enable sustainable curation of published vascular tissue simulations within the Chaste environment. It will be standards-based and infrastructure-supportive, adopting existing standards where they exist (SBML, CellML, MIRIAM, MIASE), and contributing to the development of new VPH standards (e.g., for vascular networks).