Modelli computazionali della biomeccanica cellulare

The understanding of the human body mechanobiology has greatly increased over the years leading to better health outcomes in many medical fields. The powerful tools provided by methods such as finite element analysis have been proven effective in investigating, diagnosing and curing pathologies while also providing a framework which is cheap, reproducible and customisable. The field of cellular biomechanics can greatly benefit from these tools thanks to their ability to be adapted to the investigator's needs thus allowing testing setups which would not be possible otherwise and that would more closely reproduce the in vivo conditions of interest. For these reasons, this dissertation presents relevant advancements in the type and complexity of finite element models for the investigation of both healthy and pathological cells with a focus on cancerous cells. The purely mechanical models presented use the concepts of tensegrity and bendo-tensegrity to create models which can reproduce the mechanical response of a cell undergoing micropipette aspiration or atomic force indentation while increasing the level of accuracy and complexity achieved by the classical homogeneous models present in the literature. The biomechanical models developed for this work show the potential of finite element models in bridging our understanding of cell physiology and cell biomechanics. These models have shown great potential in describing the response of the cell to both physical conditions (such as osmotic pressure fields) and mechanical stresses. Taken together, these two classes of models can greatly contribute to our understanding of the complex life of cells both from a biological and mechanical standpoint thus allowing us to take a first step in bridging these two fields.