Section: New Results

Artificial Tissue Homeostasis in Mammalian Cells

Participants : Grégory Batt, François Bertaux, Xavier Duportet, François Fages, Szymon Stoma.

Cell-based gene therapy aims at creating and transplanting genetically-modified cells into a patient in order to treat a disease. Ideally, actively-growing cells are used to form a self-maintaining tissue in the patient, thus permanently curing the disease. However, before any real therapeutic use, robust mechanisms enforcing tissue homeostasis, that is, that the size of the newly-introduced tissue remains within admissible bounds, need to be developed. We proposed various designs and tested their robustness using in silico approaches. Preliminary results demonstrated that cell-to-cell variability plays a crucial role for tissue long-term maintenance. More extensive in silico characterizations require the development of efficient multiscale simulation methods. In parallel to the in silico work, done in collaboration with the Bang research group (Dirk Drasdo), we started the construction and in vitro experimental characterization of the most promising designs in collaboration with the Weiss lab (MIT) [24] .