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We propose and study a strongly coupled PDE-ODE-ODE system modeling cancer cell invasion through a tissue network
under the go-or-grow hypothesis asserting that cancer cells can either move or proliferate. Hence our setting features
two interacting cell populations with their mutual transitions and involves tissue-dependent degenerate diffusion and
haptotaxis for the moving subpopulation. The proliferating cells and the tissue evolution are characterized by way of ODEs
for the respective densities. We prove the global existence of weak solutions and illustrate the model behaviour by
numerical simulations in a two-dimensional setting.
We consider the multiscale model for glioma growth introduced in a previous work and extend it to account
for therapy effects. Thereby, three treatment strategies involving surgical resection, radio-, and
chemotherapy are compared for their efficiency. The chemotherapy relies on inhibiting the binding
of cell surface receptors to the surrounding tissue, which impairs both migration and proliferation.
Glioma is a common type of primary brain tumor, with a strongly invasive potential, often exhibiting nonuniform, highly irregular growth. This makes it difficult to assess
the degree of extent of the tumor, hence bringing about a supplementary challenge for the treatment. It is therefore necessary to understand the
migratory behavior of glioma in greater detail.
In this paper we propose a multiscale model for glioma growth and migration. Our model couples the microscale dynamics (reduced to the binding of surface receptors to the
surrounding tissue) with a kinetic transport equation for the cell density on the mesoscopic level of individual cells. On the latter scale we also include the
proliferation of tumor cells via effects of interaction with the tissue. An adequate parabolic scaling yields a convection-diffusion-reaction equation, for which the coefficients
can be explicitly determined from the information about the tissue obtained by diffusion tensor imaging. Numerical simulations relying on DTI measurements confirm the biological
findings that glioma spreads
along white matter tracts.