Section: Overall Objectives

Overall objectives

The MAMBA (Modelling and Analysis in Medical and Biological Applications) team is the continuation of the BANG (Biophysics, Numerical Analysis and Geophysics) team, which itself was a continuation of the former project-team M3N. Historically, the BANG team, headed by Benoît Perthame during 11 years (2003-2013), has developed models, simulations and numerical algorithms for two kinds of problems involving dynamics of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).

Problems from life sciences (cell motion, early embryonic development, tissue growth and regeneration, cancer modelling, pharmacology,...) have been considered, and still constitute the core of MAMBA. Models for complex fluid flows (shallow water models, flows with a free surface) were studied until December 2012, when the scientists in charge of the “Géophysique” part left BANG to constitute the new Inria team ANGE (https://team.inria.fr/ange/), while the remaining (“Biophysique”) part of the BANG team continue their research work within the new Inria team MAMBA, now headed by Marie Doumic.

The dynamics of complex physical or biophysical phenomena involving many agents, including proteins or cells - seen as active agents - can be represented efficiently either by explicitly considering the behaviour of each particle individually (e.g. through branching trees and piecewise deterministic Markov processes, or stochastic differential equations) or by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) which, under certain hypotheses, represent local averages over a sufficiently large number of agents.

Biology and medicine currently face the difficulty to make sense out of data newly available by means of recent signal acquisition methods. Modelling through agent-based or continuous models is a unique way to explain (i.e., model) the observations and then compute, control and predict. These are the goals of MAMBA.