Cell studio: A platform for interactive, 3D graphical simulation of immunological processes

The field of computer modeling and simulation of biological systems is rapidly advancing, backed by significant progress in the fields of experimentation techniques, computer hardware, and programming software. The result of a simulation may be delivered in several ways, from numerical results, through graphs of the simulated run, to a visualization of the simulation. The vision of an in-silico experiment mimicking an in-vitro or in-vivo experiment as it is viewed under a microscope is appealing but technically demanding and computationally intensive. Here, we report “Cell Studio,” a generic, hybrid platform to simulate an immune microenvironment with biological and biophysical rules. We use game engines—generic programs for game creation which offer ready-made assets and tools—to create a visualized, interactive 3D simulation. We also utilize a scalable architecture that delegates the computational load to a server. The user may view the simulation, move the “camera” around, stop, fast-forward, and rewin...