Related papers: Testing randomness for cancer risk
This manuscript has been written to address questions related to our recent publication (Science 347:78-81, 2015). We appreciate the many reactions to this paper that have been communicated to us, either privately or publicly. The following…
Tomasetti and Vogelstein (2015a) find that the incidence of a set of cancer types is correlated with the total number of normal stem cell divisions. Here, we separate the effects of standing stem cell number (i.e., organ or tissue size) and…
In order to fulfill cell proliferation and differentiation through cellular hierarchy, stem cells can undergo either asymmetric or symmetric divisions. Recent studies pay special attention to the effect of different modes of stem cell…
Tomasetti and Vogelstein recently proposed that the majority of variation in cancer risk among tissues is due to "bad luck," that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal noncancerous stem cells. They generalize this…
Compiled data for the stem cell numbers, Ns, and division rates, ms, is reanalized in order to show that we can distinguish two groups of human tissues. In the first one, there is a relatively high fraction of maintenance (stem and transit)…
Tumors are defined by their intense proliferation, but sometimes cancer cells turn senescent and stop replicating. In the stochastic cancer model in which all cells are tumorigenic, senescence is seen as the result of random mutations,…
The appearance of cancer in a tissue is thought to be the result of two or more successive mutations. We propose a stochastic model that allows for an exact computation of the distribution of the waiting time for a second mutation. This…
We deal with a small enough tumor section to consider it homogeneous, such that populations of lymphocytes and cancer cells are independent of spatial coordinates. A stochastic model based in one step processes is developed to take into…
Large variability between cell lines brings a difficult optimization problem of drug selection for cancer therapy. Standard approaches use prediction of value for this purpose, corresponding e.g. to expected value of their distribution.…
Cancer stem cells are controlled by developmental networks that are often topologically indistinguishable from normal, healthy stem cells. The question is why cancer stem cells can be both phenotypically distinct and have morphological…
The tumour control probability (TCP) is a formalism derived to compare various treatment regimens of radiation therapy, defined as the probability that given a prescribed dose of radiation, a tumour has been eradicated or controlled. In the…
We propose a one mutation model for cancer with a mutation rate that increases with time. Under rather general hypotheses the number of mutations is necessarily a (non homogeneous) Poisson process with the prescribed mutation rate. We show…
The diversity of cell populations is regulated by extracellular and intracellular variability. The latter includes genetic, epigenetic and stochastic variability, all contributing to the experimentally observed heterogeneity in response to…
As cancer advances, cells often spread from the primary tumor to other parts of the body and form metastases. This is the main cause of cancer related mortality. Here we investigate a conceptually simple model of metastasis formation where…
We consider a model of fixed size $N = 2^l$ in which there are $l$ generations of daughter cells and a stem cell. In each generation $i$ there are $2^{i-1}$ daughter cells. At each integral time unit the cells split so that the stem cell…
An endogenous molecular-cellular network for both normal and abnormal functions is assumed to exist. This endogenous network forms a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system, with many stable attractors in its functional landscape. Normal or…
The prediction of cancer prognosis and metastatic potential immediately after the initial diagnoses is a major challenge in current clinical research. The relevance of such a signature is clear, as it will free many patients from the agony…
Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew, as well as to differentiate and give rise to new populations of cells. Stem cell divisions are crucial for generative processes that occur during early development, and later in…
We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…
An individual-based model of stochastic branching is proposed and studied, in which point particles drift in $\bar{\mathds{R}}_{+}:=[0,+\infty)$ towards the origin (edge) with unit speed, where each of them splits into two particles that…