Back

The Macroscopic Growth Laws of Brain Metastases

Ocana-Tienda, B.; Perez-Beteta, J.; Molina-Garcia, D.; Jimenez-Sanchez, J.; Leon-Triana, O.; Ortiz de Mendivil, A.; Asenjo, B.; Albillo, D.; Perez-Romasanta, L.; Valiente, M.; Zhu, L.; Garcia-Gomez, P.; Gonzalez-Del Portillo, E.; Llorente, M.; Carballo, N.; Arana, E.; Perez-Garcia, V. M.

2022-02-04 oncology
10.1101/2022.02.03.22270146 medRxiv
Show abstract

Tumor growth is the result of the interplay of complex biological processes in huge numbers of individual cells living in changing environments. Effective simple mathematical laws have been shown to describe tumor growth in vitro, or simple animal models with bounded-growth dynamics accurately. However, results for the growth of human cancers in patients are scarce. Our study mined a large dataset of 1133 brain metastases (BMs) with longitudinal imaging follow-up to find growth laws for untreated BMs and recurrent treated BMs. Untreated BMs showed high growth exponents, most likely related to the underlying evolutionary dynamics, with experimental tumors in mice resembling accurately the disease. Recurrent BMs growth exponents were smaller, most probably due to a reduction in tumor heterogeneity after treatment, which may limit the tumor evolutionary capabilities. In silico simulations using a stochastic discrete mesoscopic model with basic evolutionary dynamics led to results in line with the observed data.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.