The aorta is a large artery which distributes blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Over our lifetimes, it withstands millions of pulsatile loading cycles and is remarkably robust to perturbations.
The structure and function of the aorta is regulated by cells within the vessel wall, which can sense their mechanical environment (e.g. changes in blood pressure and flow) and respond by reorganising, producing or degrading key biological materials. As an example, increased blood pressure leads to increased stress, causing healthy cells to produce more collagen. This reinforces the wall and brings stresses back to their original values in a so-called `adaptive response’. Many vascular diseases, however, result from a disruption in normal cellular responses and a subsequent failure of the vessel to adapt when needed.
In this talk, I will describe the mathematical techniques used to model vessel-level mechanics (constrained mixture models) and cell-level signalling networks (logic-based ODEs), and present results from a multiscale model with coupling between the two scales. With this multiscale model, we can track and simulate disruptions in cell signalling to better understand the robustness of the healthy aorta to perturbations, and to identify potential drivers of disease.