Multicellular simulation in cancer treatment with nanoparticles

Cancer is a complex systems problem that involves tumor cells and their microenvironment. Recently, research shows that engineered nanomedicine is playing an important role in cancer treatment. The traditional experimental methods involve intensive cost and time investments, as well as many operational challenges. With the increasing power of high throughput computing, it has become feasible to explore a vast variety of therapeutic designs in multicellular systems with computational modelling. In this talk, we propose an agent-based model (with PhysiCell) to investigate the therapeutic designs of cancer treatment with nanoparticles (NPs), where NPs uptaken or internalization, drug release and drug effects on tumor cells are explored. Our simulation studies show that drug-loaded nanoparticles have some allow promising new options for cancer therapy, and the point to the power of using large-scale model exploration to tune and improve therapy. In particular, we introduce a novel tracking of nanoparticle populations in each individual cells, allowing better modeling of drug release by internalized nanoparticles and long-term therapeutic implications. In this talk, I will cover the following parts:(1) how cells uptake NPs; (2) how NPs release drug inside of cells; (3) how daughter cells inherit NPs and drug from their parents; (4) how released drug treats tumor cells.