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Tomasetti and Vogelstein (2015) collected data on 31 different tissue types and found a correlation of 0.8 between the logarithms of the incidence of cancer (LCI), and the estimated number of stem cell divisions in those tissues (LSCD).…

Tomasetti and Vogelstein recently proposed that the majority of variation in cancer risk among tissues is due to "bad luck," that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal noncancerous stem cells. They generalize this…

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…

This manuscript has been written to address questions related to our recent publication (Science 347:78-81, 2015). We appreciate the many reactions to this paper that have been communicated to us, either privately or publicly. The following…

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…

Compiled data for the stem cell numbers, Ns, and division rates, ms, is reanalized in order to show that we can distinguish two groups of human tissues. In the first one, there is a relatively high fraction of maintenance (stem and transit)…

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…

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,…

A small portion of a tissue defines a microstate in gene expression space. Mutations, epigenetic events or external factors cause microstate displacements which are modeled by combining small independent gene expression variations and large…

In previous theoretical research, we inferred that cancer stem cells (CSCs), the cells that presumably drive tumor growth and resistance to conventional cancer treatments, are not uniformly distributed in the bulk of a tumorsphere. To…

The topology of gene expression space for a set of 12 cancer types is studied by means of an entropy-like magnitude, which allows the characterization of the regions occupied by tumor and normal samples. The comparison indicates that the…

The goal of immunotherapy is to enhance the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells. Immunotherapy is more effective and, in general, the prognosis is better, when more immune cells infiltrate the tumor. We explore the question of…

Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew, as well as to differentiate and give rise to new populations of cells. Stem cell divisions are crucial for generative processes that occur during early development, and later in…

We deal with a small enough tumor section to consider it homogeneous, such that populations of lymphocytes and cancer cells are independent of spatial coordinates. A stochastic model based in one step processes is developed to take into…

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…

Traditionally, it has been held that a central characteristic of stem cells is their ability to divide asymmetrically. Recent advances in inducible genetic labeling provided ample evidence that symmetric stem cell divisions play an…

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…

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…

Mounting evidence underscores the prevalent hierarchical organization of cancer tissues. At the foundation of this hierarchy reside cancer stem cells, a subset of cells endowed with the pivotal role of engendering the entire cancer tissue…

Heterogeneity in the size distribution of cancer cell populations has been recently linked to drug resistance and invasiveness. However, despite many progresses have been made in understanding how such heterogeneous size distributions arise…