Morphological instability and cancer invasion: a 'splashing water drop' analogy
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Morphological instability and cancer invasion: a 'splashing water drop' analogy Caterina Guiot1, Pier P Delsanto2 and Thomas S Deisboeck*3 Address: 1Dip. Neuroscience and CNISM, Università di Torino, Italy, 2Dip. Fisica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy and 3Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory, Harvard-MIT (HST) Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA Email: Caterina Guiot - [email protected]; Pier P Delsanto - [email protected]; Thomas S Deisboeck* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 25 January 2007 Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 2007, 4:4
doi:10.1186/1742-4682-4-4
Received: 27 December 2006 Accepted: 25 January 2007
This article is available from: http://www.tbiomed.com/content/4/1/4 © 2007 Guiot et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: Tissue invasion, one of the hallmarks of cancer, is a major clinical problem. Recent studies suggest that the process of invasion is driven at least in part by a set of physical forces that may be susceptible to mathematical modelling which could have practical clinical value. Model and conclusion: We present an analogy between two unrelated instabilities. One is caused by the impact of a drop of water on a solid surface while the other concerns a tumor that develops invasive cellular branches into the surrounding host tissue. In spite of the apparent abstractness of the idea, it yields a very practical result, i.e. an index that predicts tumor invasion based on a few measurable parameters. We discuss its application in the context of experimental data and suggest potential clinical implications.
Background Tissue invasion is one of the hallmarks of cancer [1]. From the primary tumor mass, cells are able to move out and infiltrate adjacent tissues by means of degrading enzymes (e.g., [2]). Depending on the cancer type, these cells may form distant settlements, i.e. metastases (e.g., [3]). Tumor expansion therefore results from the complex interplay between the developmental ability of the tumor itself and the characteristics of the host tissue in which its growth occurs (e.g., [4]). It has been recently proposed [5] that cancer invasion can be described as a morphological instability that occurs during solid tumor growth and results in invasive 'fingering', i.e. branching patterns (see Figure 1). This instability may be driven by any physical or chemical condition (oxygen, glucose, acid and drug concentration gradients), provided
that the average cohesion among tumor cells decreases and/or their adhesion to the stroma increases (for a recent review on related molecular aspects, such as the cadherin'switch', see [6]). In fact, the
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