SimBioSys Environment: A computation Microscope for Cancer Microenvironments

癌细胞的表型-一组可观察到的行为特征，包括它的侵袭性或致病性，它对药物或放射治疗的敏感性，它的代谢特征，分泌组和许多其他属性-不是由它的基因唯一定义的。相反，它是一组复杂变量的紧急性质，涉及化学和机械微环境线索、遗传扰动和细胞的表观遗传状态。虽然大量的研究集中于单独了解每个因素的致癌作用，但将它们汇编成癌症生长和进展的整体图景仍然是一个挑战。SimBioSys公司正在开发集成新陈代谢、转录和成像数据的新计算技术，以便在现实的空间和化学异质微环境中构建癌症新陈代谢的电子模型。这项技术的核心是一项新技术，它模拟了不同类型和/或表型(即干细胞与分化细胞、癌症与健康细胞等)之间的代谢物竞争和共享。我们的目的是为生物医学研究人员开发一种新的计算工具，将反应-扩散和代谢建模与大型组学和组织学数据集相结合，以提供对癌症行为的新见解。

The phenotype of a cancer cell---the set of observable behavioral characteristics including its aggressiveness or pathogenicity, its susceptibility to drug or radiation therapy, its metabolic profile, secreteome, and many other attributes---is not uniquely defined by it's genotype. Rather, it is an emergent property of a complex set of variables that involve chemical and mechanical microenvironmental cues, genetic perturbations, and the epigenetic state of the cell. While great volumes of research have focused on understanding the oncogenic role of each factor individually, compiling them into a holistic picture of cancer growth and progression remains a challenge. SimBioSys, Inc. is developing new computational technologies integrating metabolomic, transcriptomic, and imaging data, in order to construct in silico models of cancer metabolism within realistic spatially- and chemically-heterogeneous microenvironments. At the core of this technology is a novel technique that models the competition for and sharing of metabolites between cells of different types, and/or phenotypes (i.e. stem vs. differentiated, cancerous vs. healthy, etc.). Our intent is to develop a novel computational tool for biomedical researchers that integrates reaction-diffusion and metabolic modeling with large -omics and histology datasets to provide new insight into the behavior of cancers.