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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…
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…
The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of robustness and diversity in population dynamics in particular to some properties of the multi-step from healthy tissue to fully malignant tumours. Recent evidence shows that diversity within…
Cancers remain the lead cause of disease-related, pediatric death in North America. The emerging field of complex systems has redefined cancer networks as a computational system with intractable algorithmic complexity. Herein, a tumor and…
The emergence of acquired drug resistance in cancer represents a major barrier to treatment success. While research has traditionally focused on genetic sources of resistance, recent findings suggest that cancer cells can acquire transient…
Genetic alterations initiate tumors and enable the evolution of drug resistance. The pro-cancer view of mutations is however incomplete, and several studies show that mutational load can reduce tumor fitness. Given its negative effect,…
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…
Cancer progression and monotonic accumulation models were developed to discover dependencies in the irreversible acquisition of binary traits from cross-sectional data. They have been used in computational oncology and virology but also in…
Biological living systems in general exhibit complex and diverse dynamics. The latter, in particular, is essential, since diversification increases the odds of survival of an organism while reducing the risk of extinction of the population.…
There are numerous stochastic models for cancer risk for a given tissue. Many rely on the following two hypotheses. 1. There is a fixed probability that a given cell division will eventually lead to a cancerous cell. 2. Cell divisions are…
Autonomic management is aimed at adapting to uncertainty. Hence, it is devised as m-connected k-dominating set problem, resembled by dominator and dominate, such that dominators are resilient up to m-1 uncertainty among them and dominate…
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.…
The unwelcome evolution of malignancy during cancer progression emerges through a selection process in a complex heterogeneous population structure. In the present work, we investigate evolutionary dynamics in a phenotypically heterogeneous…
The majority of cancer treatments end in failure due to Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity (ITH). ITH in cancer is represented by clonal evolution where different sub-clones compete with each other for resources under conditions of Darwinian natural…
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…
We once proposed that cell-type-associated chromatin configurations determine cell types and that cancer cell type is determined by cancer-associated chromatin configuration (CACC). In this paper, we hypothesize that flexible…
Cancer stem cells are controlled by developmental networks that are often topologically indistinguishable from normal, healthy stem cells. The question is why cancer stem cells can be both phenotypically distinct and have morphological…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
Resistance to chemotherapies, particularly to anticancer treatments, is an increasing medical concern. Among the many mechanisms at work in cancers, one of the most important is the selection of tumor cells expressing resistance genes or…
Cancer has been characterized as a constellation of hundreds of diseases differing in underlying mutations and depending on cellular environments. Carcinogenesis as a stochastic physical process has been studied for over sixty years, but…