19–22 May 2025
Europe/Berlin timezone

Mathematical Modeling of Multicellular Tumor Spheroids Quantifies Inter-Patient and Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity

Not scheduled
3m

Speaker

Kevin Flores (North Carolina State University)

Description

Authors: Kevin Flores, Adam Malik, Kyle Nguyen, John Nardini, Cecilia Krona, and Sven Nelander

In the study of brain tumors, patient-derived three-dimensional sphere cultures provide an important tool for studying emerging treatments. The growth of such spheroids depends on the combined effects of proliferation and migration of cells, but it is challenging to make accurate distinctions between increase in cell number versus the radial movement of cells. To address this, we formulate a novel model in the form of a system of two partial differential equations (PDEs) incorporating both migration and growth terms, and show that it more accurately fits our data compared to simpler PDE models. We show that travelling-wave speeds are strongly associated with population heterogeneity. Having fitted the model to our dataset we show that a subset of the cell lines are best described by a ``Go-or-Grow''-type model, which constitutes a special case of our model. Finally, we investigate whether our fitted model parameters are correlated with patient age and survival.

Primary author

Kevin Flores (North Carolina State University)

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