Many mathematical models of biological cells exist. Among the most powerful for modelling the detailed interactions and geometry of individual cells are vertex dynamics models, commonly used for epithelial sheets. In this project we develop extensions to CHASTE (Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment, http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste/), an open-source modelling software developed at the Univers...

Background: For many women, the monthly suffering induced by menstrual “cramps” is severe enough to profoundly disrupt their quality of life. In the case of primary dysmenorrhea, a condition related to premenstrual syndrome (PMS), intense uterine contractions are thought to trigger moderate to intense pain despite the absence of an underlying infection or other medically-identifiable disease st...

BACKGROUND The origin of the current practice of administering Vitex agnus-castus in menopause-related complaints is uncertain, but appears to be relatively recent. Here we review the evidence for this application of Vitex based on evidence from pharmacological studies and clinical research. METHODS The mechanisms of potential relevance in the context of menopause are explored with reference ...

The simulation of cardiac electrophysiology is a mature field in computational physiology. Recent advances in medical imaging, high-performance computing and numerical methods mean that computational models of electrical propagation in human heart tissue are ripe for use in patient-specific simulation for diagnosis, for prognosis and for selection of treatment methods. However, in order to move...

For many years now, a number of Western herbs have been widely used in health food products in Japan and as pharmaceuticals in Europe. There are few or no mandated criteria concerning the quality of these herbal health food products, thus clarification is warranted. Here, we performed disintegration tests of 26 pharmaceutical and health food products containing the Western herbs ginkgo leaf and...

We introduce a Chaste plugin for the generation and the simulation of Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) in multiscale models of multicellular systems. Chaste is a widely used and versatile computational framework for the multiscale modeling and simulation of multicellular biological systems. The plugin, named CoGNaC (Chaste and Gene Networks for Cancer), allows the linking of the regulatory dynam...