Related papers: Tipping the Balance: a criticality perspective
We present a mathematical model that describes how tumour heterogeneity evolves in a tissue slice that is oxygenated by a single blood vessel. Phenotype is identified with the stemness level of a cell, $s$, that determines its proliferative…
Tumor development is an evolutionary process in which a heterogeneous population of cells with differential growth capabilities compete for resources in order to gain a proliferative advantage. What are the minimal ingredients needed to…
The progression of a cell population where each individual is characterized by the value of an internal variable varying with time (e.g. size, weight, and protein concentration) is typically modeled by a Population Balance Equation, a first…
Reversibility of state transitions is intensively studied topic in many scientific disciplines over many years. In cell biology, it plays an important role in epigenetic variation of phenotypes, known as phenotypic plasticity. More…
The phenotypic equilibrium, i.e. heterogeneous population of cancer cells tending to a fixed equilibrium of phenotypic proportions, has received much attention in cancer biology very recently. In previous literature, some theoretical models…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
Heterogeneity is a hallmark of all cancers. Tumor heterogeneity is found at different levels -- interpatient, intrapatient, and intratumor heterogeneity. All of them pose challenges for clinical treatments. The latter two scenarios can also…
We study the dynamics of a two-site model in which the tunneling amplitude between the sites is not constant but rather a high-frequency noise. Obviously, the population imbalance in this model decays exponentially with time. Remarkably,…
We study a spatially inhomogeneous model of cancer growth based on Michaelis--Menten kinetics, subjected to additive Gaussian noise and multiplicative dichotomous noise. In presence of the latter, we can observe a transition between two…
Heterogeneity within tumour cell populations is associated with an increase in malignancy and appears to play an important role during cancer metastasis. Using in silico experiments, we study the interplay between collective behaviours and…
Phenotypic noise underpins homeostasis and fitness of individual cells. Yet, the extent to which noise shapes cell-to-population properties in microbial active matter remains poorly understood. By quantifying variability in confluent…
In conventional radiotherapy, the probability of controlling tumor growth is quantified using Tumor Control Probability (TCP) models. Instead, the probability of experiencing a side effect after the irradiation of healthy tissues and organs…
In a mathematical model of interacting biological organisms, where external interventions may alter behavior over time, traditional models that assume fixed parameters usually do not capture the evolving dynamics. In oncology, this is…
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…
We consider a three-state model comprising tumor cells, effector cells and tumor detecting cells under the influence of noises. It is demonstrated that inevitable stochastic forces existing in all three cell species are able to suppress…
Cellular populations such as avascular tumors and microbial biofilms may "invade" or grow into surrounding populations. The invading population is often comprised of a heterogeneous mixture of cells with varying growth rates. The population…
We study a stochastic model for tumor cell growth with both multiplicative and additive colored noise as well as a non-zero cross-correlations in between. Whereas the death rate within the logistic model is altered by a deterministic term…
In a previous work, we presented a model that integrates cancer cell differentiation and immunotherapy, analysing a particular therapy against cancer stem cells by cytotoxic cell vaccines. As every biological system is exposed to random…
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…
In this article, we will see a new approach to study the impact of a small microscopic population of cancer cells on a macroscopic population of healthy cells, with an example inspired by pathological hematopoiesis. Hematopoiesis is the…