Mathematical Model of Stem Cell Differentiation and Tissue Regeneration with Stochastic Noise

Differentiation and self-renewal of stem cells is an essential process for the maintenance of tissue composition. The promise of novel medical therapies combined with the complexity of this process encourage us to employ numerical and mathematical methods. This will allow us to understand better the mechanisms which regulate stem cell behaviour. Perturbations to the cellular environment may have an influence on the death rate, proliferation rate and on the fraction of self-renewal at every stage of differentiation. In this paper, we present mathematical study of the effect of stochastic noise on the process of tissue regeneration. Here, a system of Itô stochastic differential equations with linear diffusion coefficients that is based on a deterministic model of multistage cell lineages is investigated. Numerical simulations of the stochastic model are shown for a different number of stages of differentiation. Interactions between the noise, added to the different stages, are characterised using numerical simulations. The long-time behaviour of the two-dimensional version of the model is fully characterised; asymptotic stability of the related Markov semigroup is proved using the theory of the Markov semigroups and the method of the Khasminskií function.