MECHANOBIOLOGICAL MODELING OF CELL MIGRATION: APPLICATION TO DISTRACTION OSTEOGENESIS

Distraction osteogenesis (DO) is a well known orthopaedic process aimed at correcting bony defects under a controlled mechanical environment. Both mechanics and biology have a strong role in this process and therefore it is very well suited for mechanobiological studies, from a macroscopic perspective [Isaksson et al, 2007; Reina-Romo et al, 2009] or from a cellular scale by incorporating cell-phenotype specific activities [Reina-Romo et al., 2011]. This latter approach tries to better understand the mechanisms by which mechanical stimuli are transferred into a biological response. However, the modelling of cell migration, which is a key process in DO, needs a deeper analysis in order to evaluate the effect of the different parameters involved in the computational modeling. Therefore, this study aims to get a deeper insight of the migration process by analyzing different possible rules at the cellular scale.