Thursday, November 7,
2013, 3pm
Location: Room 1110 of the Nguyen Engineering Building
Fereydoon Family
Department of Physics
Emory University
Physics Puts New Lens on Major Eye Disease
Abstract
Emergent phenomena in living
systems, including your ability to read these lines, do not obviously follow as a
consequence of the fundamental
laws of physics. Understanding the
physics of living systems
clearly falls outside the
conventional boundaries of scientific disciplines and requires a
collaborative,
multidisciplinary approach. What I hope to show you in this talk is how
we have
used theoretical and computational techniques from nonequilibrium
statistical physics
to make progress in understanding the physical processes that underlie
a
disease called age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the
leading
cause of blindness in adults. We have developed a mechanistic model and
studied
the growth, patterning and progression of the disease. This allowed us
to
explore and quantitatively test many more combinations of hypotheses
and
parameter choices than would have been experimentally feasible. As a
result, we
have uncovered that a previously neglected mechanical instability due
to
adhesion failure at the cell level suffices to predict the loci and
progression
of the disease. This finding not only elucidates the physics of a
complex
biological phenomenon in a living system, but it could also have a
significant
effect on the future development of targeted intervention strategies
and
clinical treatment of AMD.