Editorial: Special Section on Multiscale Cancer Modeling.

Abstract

The papers in this special section focus on the use of multiscale modeling in the field of cancer research. Cancer is a complex, heterogeneous disease, characterized by many interaction processes on, and across, multiple scales in time and space that act in concert to drive cancer formation, progression, invasion, and metastasis. These processes range from molecular reactions to cell-cell interactions, to tumor growth and invasion on the tissue-scale, and even to larger scales, such as the physiology, pathophysiology, and population scales. In addition, many cancer properties (including, e.g., size, cell density, extracellular ligands, cellular receptors, mutation type(s), phenotypic distribution, vasculature status, blood vessel permeability, and treatment prognosis) are dynamic and patient-dependent, changing and evolving with both time and treatments. For example, cell death rate may change over time due to chemotherapy. All these dynamically changing cancer properties make development of effective cancer therapies extremely difficult. Computational modeling has the potential to predict complex behaviors of cancer, elucidate regulatory mechanisms, and help inform experimental design. Everyone would agree that computer simulations are usually more cost-effective, efficient, and tractable, relative to laboratory experiments.