  The glassy dynamics in confluent epithelial monolayers is crucial for several
biological processes, such as wound healing, embryogenesis, cancer progression,
etc. Several experiments have indicated that, unlike particulate systems, the
glassy dynamics in these systems correlates with the static properties and
shows a readily-found sub-Arrhenius relaxation. However, whether the
statics-dynamics correlation is only qualitative or can provide quantitative
predictions and what leads to the sub-Arrhenius relaxation remains unclear. We
apply a particular analytical theory of glassy dynamics, the mode-coupling
theory (MCT) that predicts dynamics using static properties alone as input, to
the confluent systems. We demonstrate the remarkable applicability of MCT in
simulations of the Vertex model and experiments on Madin-Darby Canine Kidney
cells and show the quantitative nature of the structure-dynamics correlation in
these systems. Our results elucidate that the structure-dynamics feedback
mechanism of MCT, and not the barrier crossing mechanism, dominates the glassy
dynamics in these systems where the relaxation time diverges as a power law
with a universal exponent of $3/2$. This slower-than-exponential divergence
naturally explains the sub-Arrhenius relaxation dynamics in these systems. The
quantitative nature of the structure-dynamics correlation also suggests the
possibility of describing various complex biological processes, such as cell
division and apoptosis, via the static properties of the systems, such as cell
shape or shape variability.
