Roles of mTOR in thoracic aortopathy understood by complex intracellular signaling interactions

Thoracic aortopathy–aneurysm, dissection, and rupture–is increasingly responsible for significant morbidity and mortality. Advances in medical genetics and imaging have improved diagnosis and thus enabled earlier prophylactic surgical intervention in many cases. There remains a pressing need, however, to understand better the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms with the hope of finding robust pharmacotherapies. Diverse studies in patients and mouse models of aortopathy have revealed critical changes in multiple smooth muscle cell signaling pathways that associate with disease, yet integrating information across studies and models has remained challenging. We present a new quantitative network model that includes many of the key smooth muscle cell signaling pathways and validate the model using a detailed data set that focuses on hyperactivation of the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway and its inhibition using rapamycin. We show that the model can be parameterized to capture the primary experimental findings both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further show that simulating a population of cells by varying receptor reaction weights leads to distinct proteomic clusters within the population, and that these clusters emerge due to a bistable switch driven by positive feedback in the PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway.