BERNARDO SCHREFLER
University of Padua and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Houston
Dr. Bernard Schrefler is professor of Structural Mechanics at the University of Padua, Senior Affiliate Member of the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston. and Secretary General of CISM and EUROMECH.
He obtained his Ph.D. and D.Sc. at the University of Wales. He received honorary doctorates from the St.Petersburg State Technical University, from the University of Technology in Lodz, from the University of Wales-Swansea, from the Leibniz University of Hanover, from the Russian Academy of Sciences and from the Ecole Normale Superieure, Cachan and holds an honorary Professorship from the University of Technology of Dalian. He is Fellow in the International Association of Computational Mechanics (IACM), received the Computational Mechanics Award and the IACM Award, the Biot Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), the Euler Medal of the European Union of Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS), the Olgierd A.Zienkiewicz Medal of the Polish Association of Computational Mechanics (PACM) and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Conference on Computational & Experimental Engineering and Sciences (ICCES). He has published over 200 papers in refereed Journals on structural engineering, soil mechanics, environmental mechanics, biomechanics and on technology for nuclear fusion, and has written or edited 33 books. He serves on the editorial board of 19 International Journals, and is Regional Editor of Mechanics Research Communications His main research interests are in multi-scale analysis and porous media mechanics including biomedical engineering and environmental geomechanics.
A multiphase model for prediction of tumor growth: a step towards drug delivery simulation
Multiphase porous media mechanics is applied to model tumor growth. The governing equations obtained via the Thermodynamically Constrained Averaging Theory (TCAT) are solved numerically by means of the Finite Element Method.
The multiphase system consists of four phases: the extracellular matrix (ECM), the tumor cells (TC), which may include a necrotic portion depending on the environmental conditions and pressure; the healthy cells (HC); and the interstitial fluid (IF) with the dissolved chemical species.
The computational model is applied to solve three cases of biological relevance. In the first case, the growth of a Multicellular 2 Tumor Spheroid (MTS) in vitro is modeled providing a good agreement between the numerical and the experimental results. In the second case, the MTS is confined within the healthy tissue which induces less favorable nutrient diffusion reducing substantially the tumor growth rate. In the third case, tumors cells growing along microvessels (the so called "tumor cord") are modeled in a 3D geometry and it is shown that the malignant cells migrate within adjacent vessels in search of new sources for nutrients and oxygen.