Seminar Abstract

“Combining experiments with agent-based modeling to study microvascular growth at the multi-cell level”

Understanding where new endothelial cells and perivascular cells come from and which signals mediate their recruitment is central to therapeutically manipulating microvascular growth and remodeling for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. Evidence suggests that vascular cells arise from bone marrow-derived progenitor cells, from within the microvasculature, and from the surrounding interstitial tissue, but it is unclear how these different cell populations contribute to microvascular growth and what signals govern their spatial and temporal dynamics. Cell trafficking—cells moving from one tissue compartment to another via the circulation—is integral to emerging treatments, such as stem cell-based therapeutic angiogenesis, yet cell trafficking is poorly understood in the in vivo setting because technical limitations prohibit the visualization of multiple individual cells in the body and their molecular mediators. We combine in vivo and in vitro experimental assays with agent-based computational modeling to obtain a systems-level view of this complex process and to establish more informed approaches for utilizing progenitor cells to engineer new microvascular networks.