Related papers: Recognizing Cancer via Somatic and Organic Evoluti…
One of many important features of the tumour microenvironment is that it is a place of active Darwinian selection where different tumour clones become adapted to the variety of ecological niches that make up the microenvironment. These…
Most cancers in humans are large, measuring centimeters in diameter, composed of many billions of cells. An equivalent mass of normal cells would be highly heterogeneous as a result of the mutations that occur during each cell division.…
Metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from a primary tumor to secondary location(s) in the human organism, is the ultimate cause of death for the majority of cancer patients. That is why, it is crucial to understand metastases evolution in…
Cancer is a disease of cellular regulation, often initiated by genetic mutation within cells, and leading to a heterogeneous cell population within tissues. In the competition for nutrients and growth space within the tumors the phenotype…
Heterogeneity within tumour cell populations is associated with an increase in malignancy and appears to play an important role during cancer metastasis. Using in silico experiments, we study the interplay between collective behaviours and…
Cancer results from a sequence of genetic and epigenetic changes which lead to a variety of abnormal phenotypes including increased proliferation and survival of somatic cells, and thus, to a selective advantage of pre-cancerous cells. The…
We study the spatial evolutionary dynamics of solid tumors as they obtain additional driver mutations. We start with a cancer clone that expands uniformly in three dimensions giving rise to a spherical shape. We assume that cell division…
Cancer is viewed as a multistep process whereby a normal cell is transformed into a cancer cell through the acquisition of mutations. We reduce the complexities of cancer progression to a simple set of underlying rules that govern the…
Do cancer cells escape their confinement of their original habitat in the primary tumor or are they forced out by ecological changes in their home niche? Describing metastasis in terms of a simple one-way migration of cells from the primary…
We study the effect of intratumor heterogeneity in the likelihood of cancer cells moving from a primary tumor to other sites in the human body, generating a metastatic process. We model different scenarios of competition between tumor cells…
The accumulation of somatic mutations is a driver of cancer and has long been associated with ageing. Due to limitations in quantifying mutation burden with age in non-cancerous tissues, the impact of somatic mutations in other ageing…
Integrating experimental data into ecological models plays a central role in understanding biological mechanisms that drive tumor progression where such knowledge can be used to develop new therapeutic strategies. While the current studies…
A cell-molecular based evolutionary model of tumor development driven by a stochastic Moran birth-death process is developed, where each cell carries molecular information represented by a four-digit binary string, used to differentiate…
A small but growing number of people are finding interesting parallels between ecosystems as studied by ecologists (think of a Savanna or the Amazon rain forest or a Coral reef) and tumours1-3. The idea of viewing cancer from an ecological…
In the end of the second decade of 20th century, Warburg showed how cancer cells present a fermentative respiration process, related to a metabolic injury. Here, we develop an analysis of the cell process based on its heat outflow, in order…
The majority of cancer treatments end in failure due to Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity (ITH). ITH in cancer is represented by clonal evolution where different sub-clones compete with each other for resources under conditions of Darwinian natural…
In this paper we propose an ecological resilience point of view on cancer. This view is based on the analysis of a simple ODE model for the interactions between cancer and normal cells. The model presents two regimes for tumor growth. In…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
Recent works have stressed the important role that random mutations have in the development of cancer phenotype. We challenge this current view by means of bioinformatic data analysis and computational modelling approaches. Not all the…
Cancer is increasingly perceived as a systems-level, network phenomenon. The major trend of malignant transformation can be described as a two-phase process, where an initial increase of network plasticity is followed by a decrease of…