Several diseases such as inflammation (e.g. chronic intestinal inflammation and chronic inflammatory disease in cardiovascular system), infections (e.g. infection of airway epithelium, human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and foot-and-mouth disease), acute lung injury, allergies and cancer have been found, recently, to be closely influenced or developed by the epithelial cell dysfunction (e.g. loss of homeostasis).
The high prevalence of these diseases can be attributed to the lack of understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms, limiting the effectiveness of the current treatments and of preventive strategies. To find new ways to effectively prevent and cure these diseases, it is crucial to understand the: mechanism of the homeostasis and the pathogenic mechanisms that result in loss of epithelial homeostasis; mechanical properties and the dynamic behavior of the epithelial cellular networks; epithelial barrier as a controller of two physiological environments in different organs such as gut, mouth, heart (and all cardiovascular system), lung.
In this work we present a study, through mathematical modeling and numerical simulations, which contributes to the understanding of the role of epithelial dysfunction in inflammation. The mathematical model is based on PDE's and nonlinear ODE's which describes the transport across the epithelial, taking into account the mechanical structure and dynamical properties of epithelial cellular networks, the epithelial barrier as a controller of two physiological environments in different organs, the signal exchange between the cells and the epithelial junctions proteins.