Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth inhuman cancers
Abstract
Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a measure of the size of the system. Here we describe the discovery of universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers. This dependence underpins increasing tumour aggressiveness, due to evolutionary dynamics, which leads to an explosive growth as the disease progresses. We validated this dynamic using longitudinal volumetric data of different histologies from large cohorts of cancer patients. To explain our observations we put forward increasingly complex biologically-inspired mathematical models that captured the key processes governing tumor growth. Our models predicted that the emergence of superlinear allometric scaling laws is an inherently three-dimensional phenomenon. Moreover, the scaling laws thereby identified allowed us to define a set of metabolic metrics with prognostic value, thus providing added clinical utility to the base findings.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2104.12708,
title = {Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth inhuman cancers},
author = {Víctor M. Pérez-García and Gabriel F. Calvo and Jesús J. Bosque and Odelaisy León-Triana and Juan Jiménez and Julián Pérez-Beteta and Juan Belmonte-Beitia and Manuel Valiente and Lucía Zhu and Pedro García-Gómez and Pilar Sánchez-Gómez and Esther Hernández-San Miguel and Rafael Hortigüela and Youness Azimzade and David Molina-García and Álvaro Martínez and Ángel Acosta Rojas and Ana Ortiz de Mendivil and Francois Vallette and Philippe Schucht and Michael Murek and María Pérez-Cano and David Albillo and Antonio F. Honguero Martínez and Germán A. Jiménez Londoño and Estanislao Arana and Ana M. García Vicente},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12708},
year = {2021}
}