Book excerpt: Simulating blood cells for biomedical applications is a challenging goal. Whether you want to investigate blood flow behavior on the cell scale, or use a blood cell model for fast computational prototyping in microfluidics, Computational Blood Cell Mechanics will help you get started, and show you the path forward. The text presents a step-by-step approach to cell model building that can be adopted when developing and validating models for biomedical applications, such as filtering and sorting cells, or examining flow and deformations of individual cells under various conditions. It starts with basic building-blocks that, together, model the red blood cell membrane according to its physical properties, before moving on to discuss several issues that may pose problems along the way, and finally leads to suggestions on how to set up computational experiments. More details available at www.compbloodcell.eu