The contribution of age structure to cell population responses to targeted therapeutics

Pierre Gabriel (1, 2) , Shawn P. Garbett (3) , Vito Quaranta (3) , Darren R. Tyson (3) , Glenn F. Webb (4)

1 LJLL - Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions
2 BANG - Nonlinear Analysis for Biology and Geophysical flows
3 Department of Cancer Biology [Nashville]
4 Department of Mathematics [Nashville]

Cells grown in culture act as a model system for analyzing the effects of anticancer compounds, which may affect cell behavior in a cell cycle position-dependent manner. Cell synchronization techniques have been generally employed to minimize the variation in cell cycle position. However, synchronization techniques are cumbersome and imprecise and the agents used to synchronize the cells potentially have other unknown effects on the cells. An alternative approach is to determine the age structure in the population and account for the cell cycle positional effects post hoc. Here we provide a formalism to use quantifiable age distributions from live cell microscopy experiments to parameterize an age-structured model of cell population response.

Mots clés: Cell cycle; intermitotic time; renewal equation; exponentially modified gaussian

Domaines: Equations aux dérivées partielles [math.AP]; Cancer

Pierre Gabriel, Shawn P. Garbett, Vito Quaranta, Darren R. Tyson, Glenn F. Webb. The contribution of age structure to cell population responses to targeted therapeutics. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2012, 311, pp.19-27. ⟨10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.07.001⟩. ⟨hal-00649178v2⟩