Related papers: Computational modelling of cancer evolution by mul…
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…
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…
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.…
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,…
We aim to understand the evolution of the genetic composition of cancer cell populations. To achieve this, we consider an individual-based model representing a cell population where cells divide, die and mutate along the edges of a finite…
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…
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…
Autopsy studies of adults dying of non-cancer causes have shown that virtually all of us possess occult, cancerous lesions. This suggests that, for most individuals, cancer will become dormant and not progress, while only in some will it…
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…
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…
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…
Metastasis represents one of the main clinical challenge in cancer treatment since it is associated with the majority of deaths. Recent technological advances allow quantification of the dynamics of the process by means of noninvasive…
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…
Mathematical modeling in cancer has been growing in popularity and impact since its inception in 1932. The first theoretical mathematical modeling in cancer research was focused on understanding tumor growth laws and has grown to include…
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…
Cancer cells are widely known to be protected from apoptosis, which is a major hurdle to successful anti-cancer therapy. Over-expression of several anti-apoptotic proteins, or mutations in pro-apoptotic factors, has been recognized to…
Drug resistance and metastasis - the major complications in cancer - both entail adaptation of cancer cells to stress, whether a drug or a lethal new environment. Intriguingly, these adaptive processes share similar features that cannot be…
Cancer results from genetic alterations that disturb the normal cooperative behavior of cells. Recent high-throughput genomic studies of cancer cells have shown that the mutational landscape of cancer is complex and that individual cancers…
In this work, we investigate the population dynamics of tumor cells under therapeutic pressure. Although drug treatment initially induces a reduction in tumor burden, treatment failure frequently occurs over time due to the emergence of…
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…