An Emerging Allee Effect Is Critical for Tumor Initiation and Persistence.
Tumor cells develop different strategies to cope with changing microenvironmental conditions. A prominent example is the adaptive phenotypic switching between cell migration and proliferation. While it has been shown that the migration-proliferation plasticity influences tumor spread, it remains unclear how this particular phenotypic plasticity affects overall tumor growth, in particular initiation and persistence. To address this problem, we formulate and study a mathematical model of spatio-temporal tumor dynamics which incorporates the microenvironmental influence through a local cell density dependence. Our analysis reveals that two dynamic regimes can be distinguished. If cell motility is allowed to increase with local cell density, any tumor cell population will persist in time, irrespective of its initial size. On the contrary, if cell motility is assumed to decrease with respect to local cell density, any tumor population below a certain size threshold will eventually extinguish, a fact usually termed as Allee effect in ecology. These results suggest that strategies aimed at modulating migration are worth to be explored as alternatives to those mainly focused at keeping tumor proliferation under control.
Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Katrin
K
Böttger
Center for Advancing Electronics, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Haralambos
H
Hatzikirou
Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany; Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Anja
A
Voss-Böhme
Department of Biophysical Chemistry, Institute of Physical Chemistry, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany.
Elisabetta Ada
EA
Cavalcanti-Adam
Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Facultad de Matemáticas, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain.
Miguel A
MA
Herrero
Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Andreas
A
Deutsch
D002452:Cell Count; D002465:Cell Movement / Q000502:physiology; D049109:Cell Proliferation / Q000502:physiology; D019295:Computational Biology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008954:Models, Biological; D009385:Neoplastic Processes; D059016:Tumor Microenvironment / Q000502:physiology*