Simulation of Endothelial Response to Injury

The study of the response of arterial endothelium to injury is of importance in understanding the role this protective blood-tissue barrier plays in thrombosis and atherosclerosis. As a mechanism to further interpret experimental data, a physical model of this response is developed from published literature, and is used in the formulation of a stochastic simulation. The simulation is used to explore the concept of random cell injury, and to study the potential effects of local stresses and mitogenic factors released at the site of injury. The principle result of the simulated study is that current experimental evidence, showing endothelial cell division to be clustered and nonuniformly distributed, is compatible with random cell injury and mitosis. Local mitogenic factors are theoretically capable of modifying the distribution of dividing cells and creating regions of high cell turnover. The digital simulation also demonstrates that if an element of randomness exists in cell injury, conventional population statistics will not be stationary in time.