Modeling Intestinal Glucose Absorption for Diabetes Prediction – MIGAD

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is the main epidemic of this century. A recent hypothesis
of medical research is that an important cause of T2D may be the abnormal
regulation of glucose absorption in the small intestine. The objective of the
present project is to investigate the relative contribution of each regulatory
mechanism in the postprandial glucose response, with a particular focus on the
mechanism of intestinal glucose absorption. Indeed, despite of many experimental
observations, this question remains poorly investigated. Both whole-body
physiological and cellular level will be considered. We will adopt a systems biology
approach based on formal computational models enhanced by wet-lab experiments.
Unlike all the models already available and defined by means of differential
equations, we will propose to work with reaction networks. Those are metamodels that
add a graph structure to ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and allow for a wider range of analysis
methods from computational systems biology. We will also study novel
analysis methods for reaction networks able to deal with aspects of postprandial glucose response and diabetes.
The hope is to improve the identification of the causes of T2D and, in the longer
run, the prediction of appropriate therapies based on reaction networks.