Modelling metastasis of breast cancer cells

Advanced breast cancer leads to bone metastases. In this project we ask why and how breast cancer cells migrate to the bone and how they mechanically interact with the bone microenvironment. Cell migration is affected by the geometry and mechanical properties of the environment a cell is moving in. When this project started we already had some existing code written in the PI's group for simulating an active droplet model of a migrating cell using finite difference and immersed boundary methods. The main aim of this project is to extend this existing code to include models of the bone microenvironment. This will allow us to study the effects of the environment on the cell migration. Initially the student has added walls to the simulation to confine the migrating active droplet. These walls are made elastically deformable and can be initiated with arbitrary geometry. The next steps of the project will be to add more complex mechanical properties to the walls (such as viscoelasticity and out of equilibrium activity) and to feed into the simulations experimental data on the bone geometry and mechanical properties from our collaborators in experimental physics (PIs Jamie Hobbs and Ashley Cadby) and oncology (PIs Nicola Brown and Ingunn Holen). This studentship is funded half by EPSRC and half by the medicine faculty of the University of Sheffield and is associated with a CRUK grant awarded to the PIs.
This is an interdisciplinary project that fits into the EPSRC grand challenge of the 'Physics of Life' and into its growth area of 'soft matter and biological physics'. The theoretical modelling of this project aims to develop the computational tools necessary for such work but also to deepen our understanding of the science of the complex, composite, active, polymeric, living materials involved. On the longer term we hope this work will lead to therapeutic advances in the treatment of breast cancer metastatic bone cancer.