Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Angiogenesis, growth of new blood vessels from existing ones, is animportant process in normal development, wound healing, and cancer development.  Presented with increasingly complex biological data and observations, the daunting task is to develop a mathematical model that is useful, i.e. can help to answer important and relevant questions, or to test a hypothesis, and/or to cover a novel mechanism. I will present two cell-based multiscale models focusing on biochemical (vescular endothelial growth factors) and biomechanical (extra-cellular matrix) interactions.  Our models consider intracellular signaling pathways, cell dynamics, cell-cell andcell-environment interactions. I will show that they reproduced someexperimental observations, tested some hypotheses, and generated more hypotheses.