The majority of cancer death is not caused by the initial tumor. Instead, individual tumor cells break away from the initial tumor and travel through the blood and seed in distant, vital organs leading to a much worse prognosis. Once cancer cells are in the blood stream, they invade the organs by penetrating the endothelial cell barrier in a process known as extravasation. From previous work, it has been found that tumor cells tend to extravasate at vertex points of the cell barrier. The purpose of this project is to develop a computational model of the endothelial cell barrier that will provide more insight on extravasation, and explain this trend in the data. The model will be used to make predictions, which will guide future experiments on the extravasation of cancer cells.

I took a class last semester on biomechanics, and found it really interesting. Ive had some experience in modeling simple systems, and this superUROP seemed like a challenge that would help me learn more about both about systems modeling and the field of biomechanics.