From cell death to embryo arrest: Mathematical models of human preimplantation embryo development

Human preimplantation embryos exhibit high levels of apoptotic cells and high rates of developmental arrest during the first week in vitro. The relation between the two is unclear and difficult to determine by conventional experimental approaches, partly because of limited numbers of embryos. We apply a mixture of experiment and mathematical modeling to show that observed levels of cell death can be reconciled with the high levels of embryo arrest seen in the human only if the developmental competence of embryos is already established at the zygote stage, and environmental factors merely modulate this. This suggests that research on improving in vitro fertilization success rates should move from its current concentration on optimizing culture media to focus more on the generation of a healthy zygote and on understanding the mechanisms that cause chromosomal and other abnormalities during early cleavage stages.

Failure of programmed cell death and differentiation as causes of tumors: some simple mathematical models.

Most models of tumorigenesis assume that the tumor grows by increased cell division. In these models, it is generally supposed that daughter cells behave as do their parents, and cell numbers have clear potential for exponential growth. We have constructed simple mathematical models of tumorigenesis through failure of programmed cell death (PCD) or differentiation. These models do not assume that descendant cells behave as their parents do. The models predict that exponential growth in cell numbers does sometimes occur, usually when stem cells fail to die or differentiate. At other times, exponential growth does not occur: instead, the number of cells in the population reaches a new, higher equilibrium. This behavior is predicted when fully differentiated cells fail to undergo PCD. When cells of intermediate differentiation fail to die or to differentiate further, the values of growth parameters determine whether growth is exponential or leads to a new equilibrium. The predictions of the model are sensitive to small differences in growth parameters. Failure of PCD and differentiation, leading to a new equilibrium number of cells, may explain many aspects of tumor behavior--for example, early premalignant lesions such as cervical intraepithelial neoplasia, the fact that some tumors very rarely become malignant, the observation of plateaux in the growth of some solid tumors, and, finally, long lag phases of growth until mutations arise that eventually result in exponential growth.

Models of immune memory: On the role of cross-reactive stimulation, competition, and homeostasis in maintaining immune memory

There has been much debate on the contribution of processes such as the persistence of antigens, cross-reactive stimulation, homeostasis, competition between different lineages of lymphocytes, and the rate of cell turnover on the duration of immune memory and the maintenance of the immune repertoire. We use simple mathematical models to investigate the contributions of these various processes to the longevity of immune memory (defined as the rate of decline of the population of antigen-specific memory cells). The models we develop incorporate a large repertoire of immune cells, each lineage having distinct antigenic specificities, and describe the dynamics of the individual lineages and total population of cells. Our results suggest that, if homeostatic control regulates the total population of memory cells, then, for a wide range of parameters, immune memory will be long-lived in the absence of persistent antigen (T1/2 > 1 year). We also show that the longevity of memory in this situation will be insensitive to the relative rates of cross-reactive stimulation, the rate of turnover of immune cells, and the functional form of the term for the maintenance of homeostasis.