Study of capillary network directionality and irrigation of hypoxic tissue in an angiogenesis lattice model

B. MOGLIA; GUISONI, N.; E V ALBANO

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2013 vol. 392 p. 6389 - 6399

0378-4371

To shed light on the understanding of the angiogenesis process, we study a simplified latticemodel for the capillary network formation between an existing blood vessel and aninitially hypoxic tissue. We consider that the cells of the tissue surface can release growthfactors that will diffuse, leading to the formation of new capillaries that ultimately arrive atthe tissue. Additionally, we consider the local production of growth factors by the growingcapillary network.Wealso propose the existence of an inhibition mechanism at the hypoxicsurface, i.e., a fixed number of neighboring sites of an already irrigated site of the hypoxictissue stop releasing growth factors due to the arrival of nutrients. Particularly, the goalof this work is to study the effect of the release of local growth factors and the inhibitionmechanism on properties such as the directionality of the growing network and the irrigationof the hypoxic tissue. Therefore we propose the quantification of these two relevantfeatures for angiogenesis modeling. We establish a relationship between the model behaviorwithout the release of local growth factors in the presence of the inhibition mechanismand a normal angiogenesis process. In this situation, the model gives a directional capillarynetwork and a good irrigation of the hypoxic tissue. On the other hand, for a large number ofreleased local growth factors in the absence of the inhibition mechanism, the model couldbe appropriate for the description of tumor angiogenesis. In this case, the model providesa rather small directionality for the growing structure, with a worse degree of irrigation ofthe hypoxic tissue, as well as a more tortuous capillary network with many closed branchesand loops.