Professor, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil.

Speech Title: Multi-scale mechanobiological model for mineralized tissues
Abstract: Bone tissue is a dynamic system capable of changing its own density in response to biomechanical stimuli. The biological system studied herein consists of three cellular types, responsive osteoblasts, active osteoblasts and osteoclasts, and four types of signaling molecules, PTH, TGF-, RANKL and OPG. This article examines the biological response to a specific mechanical stimulus in a cellular model for bone remodeling. A two-dimensional example is proposed with spatial discretization performed through the finite element method. The temporal evolution of the biological variables and bone density is obtained using the Runge-Kutta method. Deformation energy served as mechanical stimulus to trigger cellular activity demonstrating the temporal evolution of density distribution in a model of a standard femur. This distribution is in agreement with other models in the literature. The main contribution of this paper is the coupling of mechanical and biological models. Another important fact is that the results can represent the local behavior of the proposed biological variables. The given example is a first step in the development of more advanced models to represent the imbalance of bone homeostasis.