# Quantitative Systems Biomedicine and Pharmacology for Multiscale Tissue Damage

> **NIH NIH R35** · STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO · 2020 · $398,750

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
Chemical, physical, and biological processes interact across multiple length and time scales and lead to
consequences for human physiology, disease progression, and medical therapeutics. Clinical outcomes and
other dynamic effects emerge from the collective behavior across multiple scales and cannot be explained simply
by studying the isolated parts at a single scale. Multiscale systems engineering approaches allow for quantitative
descriptions of interconnected processes, which aids understanding of the mechanisms for the links between
the processes that cannot be decoupled easily in experiments. The overall vision for the PI's research program
titled the Systems Biomedicine & Pharmaceutics Lab is to develop multiscale computational models and
methods for building and solving those models to enhance understanding of the mechanisms governing tissue
remodeling and damage as a result of diseases and infections and to simulate the treatment of those conditions
to improve human health. Tissue damage considered in the proposed research focuses on processes that
involve changes to the extracellular matrix (ECM), which provides biochemical and structural support to
surrounding cells. Building multiscale computational models for the chemical and biological processes that result
in structural addition or depletion of ECM, which damages various tissues, will increase fundamental mechanistic
understanding of human tissues and lay the foundation for advances in disease treatment and prevention. The
rationale is that multiscale computational models provide insights into the complex network of the effects of
molecular level actions of chemicals such as glucose, hormones, and pharmaceuticals on the cellular, tissue,
and whole body levels of physiology. The proposed research addresses the critical need to compile the multiple
processes that contribute to the onset and progression of chronic tissue damage into user-friendly systematic
computational frameworks capable of taking the interconnected chemical, physical, and biological factors into
account in a coupled fashion and in the appropriate magnitudes and sequences to make testable predictions. In
the absence of such frameworks, unraveling the network of events in the chronic injury of tissues will continue
to be perplexing, and the development of effective pharmaceutical treatments will likely remain piecemeal and
slow. The goals for the next five years are 1) to develop methods to accelerate and facilitate the construction
and reuse of the multiscale models and 2) to create new multiscale models to improve physiological
understanding of how local and systemic immune stimulants affect damage in arthritic autoimmune inflammation
and cancer immunotherapy. These goals build upon methods the PI's lab has adopted for quantitative systems
biomedicine and pharmacology and the recent results they have produced related to computational models
applied to multiscale tissue damage in diabetic kidney dise...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10399790
- **Project number:** 7R35GM133763-03
- **Recipient organization:** STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
- **Principal Investigator:** Ashlee Nicole Ford Versypt
- **Activity code:** R35 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $398,750
- **Award type:** 7
- **Project period:** 2019-09-01 → 2024-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10399790

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10399790, Quantitative Systems Biomedicine and Pharmacology for Multiscale Tissue Damage (7R35GM133763-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10399790. Licensed CC0.

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