Macroscopic approach to cancer modeling: the search for hidden interactions

C.A. CONDAT

Petropolis

Encuentro; Encontro em Modelagem Matemática de Crescimento Tumoral; 2014

Laboratorio Nacional de Computación Científica (Brasil)

Macroscopic approach to cancer modeling: the search for hidden interactions Carlos A. Condat IFEG ? CONICET and FaMAF, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina Cancer growth is an extremely complex phenomenon. Among other factors, the interaction with the biological environment and the evolution of competing cell populations make its understanding a very hard task. Mathematical modeling may lead to a better formulation of the problems involved and to the generation of predictions that may supplement and even guide experimental studies. In this talk we discuss a ?global? approach, where the tumor is considered as a single entity that may be composed of one or more populations. If there are several populations, we expect that the tumor evolution will be characterized by the interactions between these populations and with their common environment. The vector universality formalism, recently developed to describe the interactive growth of two or more organisms, can be used to obtain information about these interactions in cancer. Here we will show how to apply this formalism to various instances of competition between tumor populations: HeLa cells simultaneously exhibiting two different phenotypes (motile and reproductive), in vitro and in vivo multicellular spheroid growth, and a coevolving spheroid and subspheroid system. The parameters obtained from the fits yield new information about the interactions among the involved phenotypes, showing that the formalism is especially useful when no alternative models exist.