Emergent properties of a non-physiological computational model of tumour growth
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Computational Biology, Oncology, Computational Science
- Keywords
- cancer, evolution, computational model, carcinogenesis, tissue organisation field theory, somatic mutation theory, modelling, genetic algorithm
- Copyright
- © 2016 Pantziarka
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Emergent properties of a non-physiological computational model of tumour growth. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1558v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1558v2
Abstract
While there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the genetic drivers and molecular pathways involved in cancer in recent decades, there also remain key areas of dispute with respect to fundamental theories of cancer. The accumulation of vast new datasets from genomics and other fields, in addition to detailed descriptions of molecular pathways, cloud the issues and lead to ever greater complexity. One strategy in dealing with such complexity is to develop thought experiments which selectively focus on different levels of abstraction in order to build models to replicate salient features of the system and therefore to build hypotheses which reflect on the real system. NEATG is a simple non-physiological tumour growth model which displays emergent behaviours that correspond to a number of clinically relevant phenomena including tumour growth, intra-tumour heterogeneity, growth arrest and accelerated repopulation following cytotoxic insult. Analysis of model data suggests that the processes of cell competition and apoptosis are key drivers of these emergent behaviours. Questions are raised as to the role of cell competition and cell death in physical cancer growth and the relevance these have to cancer research in general is discussed.
Author Comment
The paper has been extensively rewritten to clarify the rationale for this work and to draw out in more detail the relevance of the results to real tumour growth and current issues in oncological research.