Abstract
This is a theoretical paper which examines at a game theoretical perspective the dynamics of cooperators and cheater cells under metabolic stress conditions and high spatial heterogeneity. Although the ultimate aim of this work is to understand the dynamics of cancer tumor evolution under stress, we use a simple bacterial model to gain fundamental insights into the progression of resistance to drugs under high competition and stress conditions.
Highlights
In cancer, there is much more happening than an uncontrolled growth of cells
The first is that a tumor resembles a bacterial biofilm, a concept which we have developed in a recent article.[2]
We proposed that such similarities are sound enough to motivate the use of bacteria under high stress as a biological model for the evolution of cancer cell drug resistance and tumor development
Summary
There is much more happening than an uncontrolled growth of cells. If a solid cancer tumor was confined to that single phenotype, a simple surgical removal of the tumor, when possible, would cure the patient. We consider cancer’s likeness to a community of bacteria, as cells grow, compete for nutrients and develop resistance to toxicity In this instance, the cancerous cells of a tumor might resemble a mutant strain of bacteria from an initial wild type population. In the context of game theory, selfish growth strategies are attributed to both cancerous cells and stress resistant prokaryotes, in contrast to their neighbors’ strategies of regulated growth and homeostasis. We proposed that such similarities are sound enough to motivate the use of bacteria under high stress as a biological model for the evolution of cancer cell drug resistance and tumor development. We claim that when this game theoretic framework is modified to account for heterogeneous stress patterns, as it is in our spatially resolved model presented here, there are emergent cooperative outcomes between the two cell types
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