Modeling iPSC-derived Endothelial Cell Transition in Tumor Angiogenesis using Petri Nets

Abstract

Tumor angiogenesis concerns the development of new blood vessels supplying the necessary nutrients for the further development of existing tumor cells. The entire process is complex, involving the production and consumption of chemicals, endothelial cell transitions as well as cell interactions, divisions, and migrations. Microfluidic cell culture platform has been used to study angiogenesis of endothelial cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC-ECs) for a physiological relevant micro-environment. In this paper, we elaborate on how to define a pipeline for simulating the transformation and process that an iPSC-derived endothelial cell goes through in this biological scenario. We leverage the robustness and simplicity of Petri nets for modeling the cell transformation and associated constraints. The environmental and spacial factors are added using custom 2-dimensional grids. Although the pipeline does not capture the entire complexity of tumor angiogenesis, we are able to capture the essence of endothelial cell transitions in tumor angiogenesis using this conceptually simplified solution.