Statistical mechanics model of angiogenic tumor growth

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lattice model for tumor growth influenced by nutrient supply, revealing different critical behaviors and tumor morphology depending on nutrient distribution correlations, with implications for understanding angiogenic growth.

Contribution

It presents a novel lattice model that incorporates nutrient-tumor correlations, mimicking angiogenic growth and revealing new critical behaviors and tumor survival dynamics.

Findings

Correlated nutrient supply alters tumor extinction behavior.

Angiogenic-like growth affects tumor morphology.

Correlation increases tumor survival probability.

Abstract

We examine a lattice model of tumor growth where survival of tumor cells depends on the supplied nutrients. When such a supply is random, the extinction of tumors belongs to the directed percolation universality class. However, when the supply is correlated with distribution of tumor cells, which as we suggest might mimick the angiogenic growth, the extinction shows different, and most likely novel critical behaviour. Such a correlation affects also the morphology of the growing tumors and drastically raise tumor survival probability.