Despite important advances in the development and in the use of both diagnostic and treatment tools in medicine, the management of highly multifactorial conditions of load-bearing organs and tissues remains poorly efficient. Over the last decades, numerical models in  biomechanics have allowed improving our understanding of several conditions, which is partly due to top-down rational explorations of the likely role of mechanical factors in the multifaceted regulation of the function of load-bearing tissues in health and disease. Yet, the translation of mechanical predictions into biology-based rationales remains a major challenge, to target promising biomarkers for prevention, early diagnosis and treatment. Theoretical tissue constitutive models in continuum mechanics can explicitly integrate tissue composition parameters through multiphysics and/or multiscale modelling, and pave the way to mechanistic descriptions of couplings through which organ and tissue biomechanics are affected by composition changes, the latter being regulated by dynamic cell behaviours in multifactorial micro-environments. This seminar will provide an overview of the efforts done in this direction by the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Lab of the BCN MedTech Unit, at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Heterogeneous systems of models and simulation technologies, including regulatory network or rule-based modelling, agent-based and  finite element modelling, appear necessary to rationally interpolate organ- and cell-level evidences and achieve an educated use of simulation results to build new concepts for improved diagnosis and prevention. Applications cases include arthropathies, lung emphysema, osteoporosis and atherosclerosis.

Jérôme Noailly is principal investigator of the Multiscale and Computational Biomechanics  and Mechanobiology (MBIOMM) group (2014-SGR-1616). As a member of the  Department of Information and Communication Technologies and SIMBIOSys  group at UPF, he generated synergies to integrate medical image analysis  and machine learning dimensions into the MBIOMM activities. At the same  time, he was consolidating the combination of computational systems  biology approaches and biomechanical /multiphysics modelling, for  multiscale explorations of tissues and organs, in health and disease. In  2016, Jérôme was awarded a Ramon y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2015-18888)  from the Spanish government, and he is currently the Principal  Investigator of the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Area of the Barcelona Centre for New Medical Technologies (BCN MedTech - 2017-SGR-1386).