On the use of stochastic Petri nets in the analysis of Signal Transduction Pathways for Angiogenesis process

In this paper we consider the modeling of a selected portion of signal transduction events involved in the angiogenesis process. The detailed model of this process contains a large number of parameters and the data available from wet-lab experiments are not sufficient to obtain reliable estimates for all of them. To overcome this problem, we suggest ways to simplify the detailed representation that result in models with a smaller number of parameters still capturing the overall behaviour of the detailed one. Starting from a detailed stochastic Petri net (SPN) model that accounts for all the reactions of the signal transduction cascade, using structural properties combined with the knowledge of the biological phenomena, we propose a set of model reductions.