Related papers: Evolutionary dynamics of cancer: from epigenetic r…
The availability of cancer measurements over time enables the personalised assessment of tumour growth and therapeutic response dynamics. However, many tumours are treated after diagnosis without collecting longitudinal data, and cancer…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
We analyze the dynamics of evolutionary games in which fitness is defined as an affine function of the expected payoff and a constant contribution. The resulting inhomogeneous replicator equation has an homogeneous equivalent with modified…
In this thesis we develop minimal models of the relationship between motility, growth, and evolution of cancer cells. We utilise simple simulations of a population of individual cells in space to examine how changes in mechanical properties…
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 homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Cancer is most commonly viewed as resulting from somatic mutations enhancing proliferation and invasion. Some hypotheses further propose that these new capacities reveal a breakdown of multicellularity allowing cancer cells to escape…
Tumor growth, which plays a central role in cancer evolution, depends on both the internal features of the cells, such as their ability for unlimited duplication, and the external conditions, e.g., supply of nutrients, as well as the…
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…
An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place --…
The nervous system is today recognized to play an important role in the development of cancer. Indeed, neurons extend long processes (axons) that grow and infiltrate tumors in order to regulate the progression of the disease in a positive…
Cycling tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, germ line, and hair follicles, require a constant flux of differentiated cells. These tissues are maintained by a population of stem cells, which generate differentiated progenies and…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…
We propose a modelling framework to analyse the stochastic behaviour of heterogeneous, multi-scale cellular populations. We illustrate our methodology with a particular example in which we study a population with an oxygen-regulated…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
The paradigm of phenotypic plasticity indicates reversible relations of different cancer cell phenotypes, which extends the cellular hierarchy proposed by the classical cancer stem cell (CSC) theory. Since it is still question able if the…
Mutation-induced drug resistance in cancer often causes the failure of therapies and cancer recurrence, despite an initial tumor reduction. The timing of such cancer recurrence is governed by a balance between several factors such as…
Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…
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…
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…