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Cancer cell migration is an essential feature in the process of tumor spread and establishing of metastasis. It characterizes the invasion observed on the level of the cell population, but it is also tightly connected to the events taking place on the subcellular level. These are conditioning the motile and proliferative behavior of the cells, but are also influenced by it. In this work we propose a multiscale model linking these two levels and aiming to assess their interdependence. On the subcellular, microscopic scale it accounts for integrin binding to soluble and insoluble components present in the peritumoral environment, which is seen as the onset of biochemical events leading to changes in the cell's ability to contract and modify its shape. On the macroscale of the cell population this leads to modifications in the diffusion and haptotaxis performed by the tumor cells and implicitly to changes in the tumor environment. We prove the (local) well posedness of our model and perform numerical simulations in order to illustrate the model predictions.
We prove the global existence, along with some basic boundedness properties, of weak solutions to a PDE-ODE system modeling the multiscale invasion of tumor cells through the surrounding tissue matrix. The model has been proposed in [22] and accounts on the macroscopic level for the evolution of cell and tissue densities, along with the concentration of a chemoattractant, while on the subcellular level it involves the binding of integrins to soluble and insoluble components of the peritumoral region. The connection between the two scales is realized with the aid of a contractivity function characterizing the ability of the tumor cells to adapt their motility behavior
to their subcellular dynamics.
The resulting system, consisting of three partial and three ordinary differential equations including a temporal delay, in particular involves chemotactic and haptotactic cross-diffusion. In order to overcome technical obstacles stemming from the corresponding highest-order interaction terms, we base our analysis on a certain functional, inter alia involving the cell and tissue densities in the diffusion and haptotaxis terms respectively, which is shown to enjoy a quasi-dissipative property. This will be used as a starting point for the derivation of a series of integral estimates finally allowing for the construction of a generalized solution as the limit of solutions to suitably regularized problems.