Travelling waves in a wound healing assay

Abstract

Several authors have predicted that cell propagation in a number of biological contexts, for example, wound healing, tumour cell invasion, angiogenesis etc., occurs due to a constant speed travelling wave of invasion. The analyses of these models to arrive at this prediction is, in many cases, essentially an extension of the classical analysis of Fisher's equation. Here, we show that a very simple wound healing assay does indeed give rise to constant speed travelling waves. To our knowledge, this is the first verification of Fisher's equation in a medical context.