3-D model reveals secrets of ...( e. Our findings help explain why ...)

"Our findings help explain why two-dimensional assays for metastasis-inhibiting drugs do not effectively predict their effects in tissue," says Lauffenburger, who is director of MITTMs Biological Engineering Division. He believes pharmaceutical companies will eventually use three-dimensional assays, accompanied by appropriate computational models such as that also recently published by Zaman (in Biophysical Journal in 2005), to determine how drugs affect metastasis.

But technology must improve before more complicated 3D studies are attempted. For his 3D work Zaman worked with one sample at a time, using a special confocal microscope at the Whitehead-MIT BioImaging Center. The microscope divided each specimen into virtual slices, generating a new stack of images every 15 minutes.

"It took me about a year to get enough data because the microscope wasnTMt designed for high-throughput experiments," he says. Fortunately, the BioImaging Center has one of the most powerful sets of computers at MIT and the imaging processing and analysis went quite quickly.

"Muhammad was successful for two reasons," says Matsudaira. "His computational model predicted what would happen in virtual experiments and then he was able to go straight to test the predictions with these complicated 3D experiments. As a result, the sophisticated models of cell movement enhance our understanding of key biological processes, including metastasis."