Migration and orientation of endothelial cells on micropatterned polymers: A simple model based on classical mechanics

Abstract

Understanding the endothelial cell migration on micropatterned polymers, as well as the cell orientation is a critical issue in tissue engineering, since it is the preliminary step towards cell polarization and that possibly leads to the blood vessel formation. In this paper, we derive a simple agent-based model to describe the migration and the orientation of endothelial cells seeded on bioactive micropatterned polymers. The aim of the modeling is to provide a simple model that corroborates quantitatively the experiments, without considering the complex phenomena inherent to cell migration. Our model is obtained thanks to a classical mechanics approach based on experimental observations. Even though its simplicity, it provides numerical results that are quantitatively in accordance with the experimental data, and thus our approach can be seen as a preliminary way towards a simple modeling of cell migration.