Healing and harm: modelling the relation between cell motion and environmental topography

Cells moving through muscle tissue to heal a wound use the same motion—membrane blebbing—that cancer cells use to spread through the body. This project builds a mechanical model of that motion, based on new experimental data from the University of Reading, to understand how cells navigate the messy, uneven environments inside living tissue. Most current research strips away that complexity, placing cells on flat plates or gels that bear little resemblance to real tissue. The model will simulate how cells extend and retract rounded membrane blisters to move, and how the surrounding topography—bumps, fibres, gaps—either guides or blocks them. If successful, the work could reveal why healing cells reach their targets while cancer cells invade healthy tissue, and suggest ways to encourage one and block the other. This is fundamental science: it does not produce a drug or device tomorrow. But understanding the physics of cell movement in realistic environments is a prerequisite for designing therapies that steer cells—whether to close a wound or stop a metastasis.