The virtual liver spatial-temporal modelling of tissue damage & regeneration

There is currently limited knowledge on how cells behave in a coordinated fashion to establish functional tissue architecture and to respond to chemically induced tissue damage during regeneration. A vision of this project is that the spatial-temporal events during tissue damage and regeneration can be simulated in silico. The Virtual Liver, together with its co-operating projects DETECTIVE, NOTOX, ESNATS, CancerSys and ToxGenom, focuses on the establishment of a three-dimensional model of the liver that correctly recapitulates alterations of the complex microarchitecture, both in response to, and during regeneration from, chemically induced liver damage. Since the exact position and metabolic capacity of the individual cells of the model are known, it should also be possible to simulate to what degree a certain pattern of chemically induced liver damage compromises the metabolic capacity at the organ level. Finally, a long-term goal will be to integrate intracellular mechanisms into each cell of the model that generate single cell f.a long-term goal, as many of the critical intracellular key mechanisms still need to be elucidated.