Related papers: Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth inhum…
We investigate the evolution of tumor growth relying on a nonlinear model of partial differential equations which incorporates mechanical laws for tissue compression combined with rules for nutrients availability and drug application.…
Recent researches on complex systems highlighted the so-called super-linear growth phenomenon. As the system size $P$ measured as population in cities or active users in online communities increases, the total activities $X$ measured as GDP…
This paper investigates the role of size in biological organisms. More specifically, how the energy demand, expressed by the metabolic rate, changes according to the mass of an organism. Empirical evidence suggests a power-law relation…
Complexity Theory is highly interdisciplinary, therefore any regularities must hold on all levels of organization, independent on the nature of the system. An open question in science is how complex systems self-organize to produce emergent…
We investigate the dynamics of a nonlinear system modeling tumor growth with drug application. The tumor is viewed as a mixture consisting of proliferating, quiescent and dead cells as well as a nutrient in the presence of a drug. The…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
In this paper we derive a statistical law of Life. It governs the probability of death, or complementary of survival, of the living organisms. We have deduced such a law coupling the widely used Weibull statistics, developed for describing…
In this paper, a two-dimensional model for the growth of multi-layer tumors is presented. The model consists of a free boundary problem for the tumor cell membrane and the tumor is supposed to grow or shrink due to cell proliferation or…
A general simple theory for the interspecific allometric scaling is developed in the $d+1$-dimensional space ($d$ biological lengths and a physiological time) of metabolic states of organisms. It is assumed that natural selection shaped the…
In this survey article, a variety of systems modeling tumor growth are discussed. In accordance with the hallmarks of cancer, the described models incorporate the primary characteristics of cancer evolution. Specifically, we focus on…
Cancer cell mutations occur when cells undergo multiple cell divisions, and these mutations can be spontaneous or environmentally-induced. The mechanisms that promote and sustain these mutations are still not fully understood. This study…
We consider two minimal mathematical models for cancer dynamics and self-adaptation. We aim to capture the interplay between the rapid progression of cancer growth and the possibility to leverage and enhance self-adaptive defense mechanisms…
With the number of sequenced genomes now over one hundred, and the availability of rough functional annotations for a substantial proportion of their genes, it has become possible to study the statistics of gene content across genomes. Here…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
Known as one of the hallmarks of cancer [30], cancer cell invasion of human body tissue is a complicated spatio-temporal multiscale process which enables a localised solid tumour to transform into a systemic, metastatic and fatal disease.…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
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.…
In a previous paper we have introduced a phenomenological model of cell metabolism and of the cell cycle to simulate the behavior of large tumor cell populations (Chignola R and Milotti E, Phys. Biol. 2 (2005) 8-22). Here we describe a…
A major goal of modern computational biology is to simulate the collective behaviour of large cell populations starting from the intricate web of molecular interactions occurring at the microscopic level. In this paper we describe a…
Recently, West et al. claimed to derive a general quantitative model based on fundamental principles for the allocation of metabolic energy between maintenance of existing tissue and the production of new biomass, and in addition claimed to…