Computational Model for Studying the Analogies Between Endocrine Systems of Humans and Rats with Diabetes Mellitus. Experimental and Simulated Results.*

As a common laboratory practice, rats are studied as biological models for understanding human endocrine behavior. However, up to now there is not a computational model of these mammals because adjusting a physiological model of the endocrine system is not an easy task. Thus, in this work the first mathematical model of the interaction between insulin and glucose in diabetic rats available to the scientific community is presented. It is based on the diabetic patient model accepted by the FDA in 2008. However, it has a large number of parameters, being most of them very difficult to determine in real patients. The main idea is to obtain a proper in silico diabetic rat which would be able to compare well with the experimental data. It will provide interesting insight about the analogies with humans and, in future, analyze the possibility of doing a realistic scale-up between both, humans and rats. Therefore, the list of model equations and the corresponding parameters, obtained by specific experiments, are described and tested with the simulated results.