The Cell Modeling Lab is the Tucker-Kellogg Lab at Duke-NUS Medical School, at the National University of Singapore. We study wound healing and cancer using mathematical modeling and biological experiments .

The battle between cell proliferation and cell death is a central question driving research in both wound healing and cancer therapy. Cancer has been described as "a wound that never heals," because cancer achieves its overgrowth by exploiting the normal signaling pathways and cellular behaviors of regeneration. Wound healing is a healthy reason for cells to proliferate rapidly, but many wounds fail to achieve sufficient regeneration. Pressure ulcers are chronic wounds that often heal poorly, and we can study them in vivo and in silico.

In one sense, the greatest difference between cancer biology and wound healing biology is the viewpoint of the researcher – for cancer, we want proliferation to be defeated, and for wound healing, we want proliferation to prevail. In both situations, cell behavior is affected (and cell phenotype can transition) due to oxidative stress and differentiation/de-differentiation. Therefore, the global behavior of a multicellular population depends on the relative timing of the proliferation, compared with the timing of the stress and the phenotype transition.

The dynamic competition between cell proliferation and cell death is sometimes best studied in silico. For both cancer and wound healing, the race between cell proliferation and cell death can be strongly influenced by a minority of cells that change their behavior or their phenotype. These changes can occur from differentiation, plasticity, mutation, altered metabolism, or drug-treatment. Tools already exist to study the change of cell state in vitro and in vivo, and we augment these approaches with computational modeling.