Related papers: Cancer recurrence times from a branching process m…
In this study, we develop consistent estimators for key parameters that govern the dynamics of tumor cell populations when subjected to pharmacological treatments. While these treatments often lead to an initial reduction in the abundance…
An explicit solution for a general two-type birth-death branching process with one way mutation is presented. This continuous time process mimics the evolution of resistance to treatment, or the onset of an extra driver mutation during…
Metastasis is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality and remains challenging to detect during early stages. Accurate identification of cancers likely to metastasize can improve treatment strategies and patient outcomes. This study…
In this work we present a flexible tool for tumor progression, which simulates the evolutionary dynamics of cancer. Tumor progression implements a multi-type branching process where the key parameters are the fitness landscape, the mutation…
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.…
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 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…
Most human tumors result from the accumulation of multiple genetic and epigenetic alterations in a single cell. Mutations that confer a fitness advantage to the cell are known as driver mutations and are causally related to tumorigenesis.…
We introduce a superstatistical model for the progression statistics of malignant cancer cells. The metastatic cascade is modeled as a complex nonequilibrium system with several macroscopic pathways and inverse-chi-square distributed…
Cancer poses danger because of its unregulated growth, development of resistant subclones, and metastatic spread to vital organs. Although the major transitions in cancer development are increasingly well understood, we lack quantitative…
Cancer progression is an evolutionary process that is driven by mutation and selection in a population of tumor cells. We discuss mathematical models of cancer progression, starting from traditional multistage theory. Each stage is…
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…
Theoretical and computational tools that can be used in the clinic to predict neoplastic progression and propose individualized optimal treatment strategies to control cancer growth is desired. To develop such a predictive model, one must…
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…
There is a widening recognition that cancer cells are products of complex developmental processes. Carcinogenesis and metastasis formation are increasingly described as systems-level, network phenomena. Here we propose that malignant…
Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell…
Recent progress in microdissection and in DNA sequencing has enabled subsampling of multi-focal cancers in organs such as the liver in several hundred spots, helping to determine the pattern of mutations in each of these spots. This has led…
Theoretical reasoning suggests that human cancer may result from knocking down the genetic constraints evolved for maintenance of the metazoan multicellularity, which, however, requires a critical test. Using xenograft-based experimental…
In this review, we discuss recent advances on the plasticity of cancer stem cells and highlight their relevance to understand the metastatic process and to guide therapeutic interventions. Recent results suggest that the strict hierarchical…
We study pattern formation of skin cancers by means of numerical simulation of a binary system consisting of cancer and healthy cells. We extend the conventional Model H for macrophase separations by considering a logistic growth of cancer…