INVESTIGATION OF THE DYNAMIC OUTCOMES OF BIOPHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL CELL-TISSUE INTERACTIONS IN VASCULAR ANASTOMOSIS AND CANCER METABOLISM

Abstract

The functionalities of tissues evolve from the complex cell-cell and cell-tissue interactions. How individual organisms and their collective behaviors impact the global structure and in turn how the dynamics of the whole, shape the individual units remain outstanding research topics in both physiological and pathological contexts – Studies of these topics provide insight into the fundamentals of tissue development and open new routes to therapeutic strategies for various diseases. This thesis is an exploration of several research topics underlying the structural and functional outcomes of multi-scale interactions in tissues using both experimental and computational approaches. This thesis has five chapters. In the first chapter, motivations for each of the studies are discussed. The fundamental concepts involved in these studies are also introduced. The second chapter discusses the first study of the thesis. This study focuses on the understanding of anastomosis during angiogenesis and vasculogenesis and the dynamics of endothelial cells in these processes with an experimental set-up in vitro. The third chapter discusses a study aiming to dissect the impact of three common hypotheses in cancer metabolism on solid tumor growth by building a multi-scale modeling platform using various computational tools. The fourth chapter discusses an experimental study on how breast cancer cells mitigate redox homeostasis in the mitochondria under chronic hypoxia. The final chapter summarizes the concluding remarks and points to future works for these studies.