title: Spatial evolution of tumors with successive driver mutations.
abstract: We study the influence of driver mutations on the spatial evolutionary dynamics of solid tumors. We start with a cancer clone that expands uniformly in three dimensions giving rise to a spherical shape. We assume that cell division occurs on the surface of the growing tumor. Each cell division has a chance to give rise to a mutation that activates an additional driver gene. The resulting clone has an enhanced growth rate, which generates a local ensemble of faster growing cells, thereby distorting the spherical shape of the tumor. We derive formulas for the abundance and diversity of additional driver mutations as function of time. Our model is semi-deterministic: the spatial growth of cancer clones is deterministic, while mutants arise stochastically.
authors.affiliation: School of Mathematics, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh EH9 3FD, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Tibor
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Antal
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
authors.forename: P L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Krapivsky
authors.affiliation: Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Department of Mathematics, and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Nowak
mesh_terms: D008954:Models, Biological; D009154:Mutation; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013269:Stochastic Processes