Virtual Living Organism, a Host to Cancer Emulation

Abstract

Rapid prototyping tools exist in many fields of science and engineering, but not as much in biology, especially not general tools that can handle the diversity and complexity of the many spatial and temporal scales in nature. In this paper we introduce and describe a tool that emulates biology and helps to create rapid prototypes of many diverse biological objects. It is anticipated that it can be used to provide support for theories, create “virtual” experiments that would be impossible to undertake or physically measure and emulate in vivo experimentation in a highly cost-effective fashion. An emulation of cancer is also introduced to test the rapid prototyping capability of the Virtual Living Organism (VLO) library. Creating the virtual versions of first chromosomes, then aneuploidy, it became possible to watch the creation of not only benign cancer as expected, but over many test runs the spontaneous emergence of a malignant version. These unexpected results show how building emulations can give insights into biology in theoretical and practical areas.