In silico exploration of post-burn contraction using uncertainty quantification

Burns can make patients’ lives quite miserable. Apart from prominent and thickened, or hypertrophic, scars, the skin may be characterized by contraction. When this contraction is so severe that the patient loses joint mobility, it is called contracture. Then a patient may have difficulties with sports or other daily activities. The consequence...

Microfluidics meets 3D cancer cell migration

An early step of metastasis requires a complex and coordinated migration of invasive tumor cells into the surrounding tumor microenvironment (TME), which contains extracellular matrix (ECM). It is being appreciated that 3D matrix-based microfluidic models have an advantage over conventional in vitro and animal models to study tumor...

Cellular processes under mechanical stress: Designing an in vitro model for testing burn splinting strategies

Introduction. To prevent burns from scar formation and contraction, the use of splinting therapy in the early phase of wound healing is considered as an effective non-surgical method. Splinting entails the application of a mechanical load in the opposite direction of the contractile force within the wound, based on the assumption that wound- or...

Loss of androgen receptor signaling in prostate cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) promotes CCL2- and CXCL8-mediated cancer cell migration

Fibroblasts are abundantly present in the prostate tumor microenvironment (TME), including cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) which play a key role in cancer development. Androgen receptor (AR) signaling is the main driver of prostate cancer (PCa) progression, and stromal cells in the TME also express AR. High-grade tumor and poor clinical...

Biomedical implications from mathematical models for the simulation of dermal wound healing

Dermal wounds are a significant global problem; although the treatment of these wounds has improved considerably over the last few decades, a treatment still does not result in a complete regeneration of the injured tissue. Instead, the final outcome of the healing process is scar tissue. The material properties of scar tissue are different from...

A mathematical model for the simulation of the formation and the subsequent regression of hypertrophic scar tissue after dermal wounding

A continuum hypothesis-based model is presented for the simulation of the formation and the subsequent regression of hypertrophic scar tissue after dermal wounding. Solely the dermal layer of the skin is modeled explicitly and it is modeled as a heterogeneous, isotropic and compressible neo-Hookean solid. With respect to the constituents of the...

Co-Orientation: Quantifying Simultaneous Co-Localization and Orientational Alignment of Filaments in Light Microscopy

Co-localization analysis is a widely used tool to seek evidence for functional interactions between molecules in different color channels in microscopic images. Here we extend the basic co-localization analysis by including the orientations of the structures on which the molecules reside. We refer to the combination of co-localization of...