Each research group represented in the work directed by Liesbet Geris is working on developing its own niche. Andy L. Olivares and Damien Lacroix, for example, are using computational methods in order to improve scaffolds which serve as a support to artificially grown biological tissue. Alberto Cincotti and Sarah Fadda have modeled the process of cellular cryopreservation, which is an indispensable stage in tissue engineering. Manuela Teresa Raimondi’s team has focused on the in vitro regeneration of cartilage which consists in seeding cartilage cells on a porous scaffold and placing it in a bioreactor. The researchers suggest mathematical models for decoding the complex phenomena at work in this type of growth. Paul N. Watton, Huifeng Huang and Yiannis Ventikos suggest a model of the arterial wall.

“All this research opens up a new field of experimentation which can be called ‘in silico’. This is because computational modeling offers the advantage of being able to be manipulated without any constraints. You can test all the theories you wish without using any (in vivo) laboratory animals. In an ever more restrictive legal and social context as far as (in vivo) experiments on animals are concerned, this new window to the real is considerable”, comments Liesbet Geris. That being said, the researchers want to develop a dialogue between the in vitro, the in vivo and the in silico, which are perceived as complementary ways to unlock the secrets of the living, as presented in the research of Liesbet Geris on so-called non-healing fractures, published recently in Plos Computational Biology, which precisely involved in vivo verification (on the rat) of the theories that were first tested in silico (see Biomedical engineering falls on a bone).

For Liesbet Geris, the computational and modeling method will help researchers to better understand what is happening in patients (some heal while others do not) or in in vivo experiments.  However, new bridges must be built between doctors and biologists on one hand, and engineers and mathematicians on the other. These are two worlds which do not always speak the same language: the work Computational Modeling in tissue Engineering is loaded with equations derived from the area of heat transfer in physics (amongst others) with which doctors and biologists are undoubtedly unfamiliar.