3D multicellular model of shock wave-cell interaction

Journal article

Understanding the interaction between shock waves and tissue is critical for ad- vancing the use of shock waves for medical applications, such as cancer therapy. This work aims to study shock wave-cell interaction in a more realistic environment, relevant to in vitro and in vivo studies, by using 3D computational models of healthy and cancerous cells. The results indicate that for a single cell embedded in an extracellular environment, the cellular geometry does not influence significantly the membrane strain but does influence the von Mises stress. On the contrary, the presence of neighbouring cells has a strong effect on the cell response, by increasing fourfold both quantities. The membrane strain response of a cell converges with more than three neighbouring cell layers, indicating that a cluster of four layers of cells is sufficient to model the membrane strain in a large domain of tissue. However, a full 3D tissue model is needed if the stress evaluation is of main interest. A tumour mimicking multicellular spheroid model is also proposed to study mutual interaction between healthy and cancer cells and shows that cancer cells can be specifically targeted in an early stage tumour-mimicking environment.

Authors: Li, D; Hallack, A; Cleveland, R; Jerusalem, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Acta Biomaterialia
• Volume: 77
• Pages: 282-291
• Publication date: 2018-05-01
• Acceptance date: 2018-04-20
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actbio.2018.04.041
• ISSN: 1742-7061
• Keywords: cell morphology effect; numerical model; cell spheroid; cancer therapy; shock wave-cell interaction