Cell death induction in p53-Mdm2 network regulated by p300 and HDAC1 using pinning control

Gene regulatory networks are important to understand cellular processes and open a door for fighting diseases in which these networks play a fundamental role. p53 has been named as “the guardian of the genome” and Mdm2 is its principal negative regulator. The p53-Mdm2 network is structurally and biologically well understood and known. In this paper, the p53-Mdm2 network regulated by p300 and HDAC1 is modeled by fourteen ordinary differential equations. Then, using such model, an oncogenic condition of Mdm2 overexpression and the functional suppression of p53 is simulated as one possible carcinogenic behavior. After that, the pinning control strategy to induce cell death is proposed using only two states (pinned nodes) of such network. The results are presented for in silico simulation and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller to achieve cell death.