E42 Cellular models

Topic

Unlike the reaction-diffusion model, which describes tumor invasion as a continuous, aggregate process, this model describes invasion at the level of individual cells or small groups of cells.

By describing tumor invasion at this level, the model captures three aspects that the reaction-diffusion model—which treats the entire tumor as a continuum—could not describe: spatial heterogeneity within the tumor itself, competition between different tumor cell clones, and collective migration behaviors that emerge when many cells move together.

The tool that enables the description of tumor invasion at this level is agent-based modeling: each cell is represented as an individual agent with its own behavioral rules defining whether it divides, dies, or migrates to another position.

These agent-based models simulate how the interaction among thousands of individual agents—each following its own behavioral rules—produces macroscopic patterns across the entire tumor; these patterns are not encoded in the rules of any single agent but emerge from the interactions among them all.

This agent-based model is particularly relevant to three specific phenomena: collective invasion, where some cells act as leaders while others follow; competition between clones at the invasion front; and heterogeneity in treatment response within a single tumor. By describing tumor invasion cell by cell rather than as a continuous average, this approach provides a level of description that most closely reflects the biology actually observed in real tumors.

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