Comparable ecological dynamics underlie early cancer invasion and species dispersal, involving self-organizing processes

DIANA E. MARCO; SERGIO A. CANNAS; MARCELO A. MONTEMURRO; BO HU; SHI-YUANCHENG

JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY

Elsevier Science B.V.

Año: 2009 vol. 256 p. 65 - 75

0022-5193

Occupancy of new habitats through dispersion is a central process innature. In particular, long distance dispersal is involved in the spread ofspecies and epidemics, although it has not been previously related with cancerinvasion, a process that involves cell spreading to tissues far away from theprimary tumour.Using simulations and real data we show that the early spread of cancer cells issimilar to the species individuals spread and we suggest that both processes arerepresented by a common spatio-temporal signature of long-distance dispersal andsubsequent local proliferation. This signature is characterized by a particularfractal geometry of the boundaries of patches generated, and a power law-scaled,disrupted patch size distribution. In contrast, invasions involving onlydispersal but not subsequent proliferation ("physiological invasions") liketrophoblast cells invasion during normal human placentation did not show thepatch size power law pattern. Our results are consistent under differenttemporal and spatial scales, and under different resolution levels of analysis.We conclude that the scaling properties are a hallmark and a direct result oflong-distance dispersal and proliferation, and that they could reflecthomologous ecological processes of population self-organisation during cancerand species spread. Our results are significant for the detection of processesinvolving long-range dispersal and proliferation like cancer local invasion andmetastasis, biological invasions and epidemics, and for the formulation of newcancer therapeutical approaches.