Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth inhuman cancers

TL;DR

This paper uncovers universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers, linking tumor growth to increased aggressiveness and providing new prognostic metrics validated across large patient cohorts.

Contribution

It reveals a novel universal scaling law in human cancers and develops biologically-inspired models explaining its emergence and clinical relevance.

Findings

Discovered superlinear metabolic scaling in tumors

Validated scaling laws with patient data

Developed models predicting tumor growth dynamics

Abstract

Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a measure of the size of the system. Here we describe the discovery of universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers. This dependence underpins increasing tumour aggressiveness, due to evolutionary dynamics, which leads to an explosive growth as the disease progresses. We validated this dynamic using longitudinal volumetric data of different histologies from large cohorts of cancer patients. To explain our observations we put forward increasingly complex biologically-inspired mathematical models that captured the key processes governing tumor growth. Our models predicted that the emergence of superlinear allometric scaling laws is an inherently three-dimensional phenomenon. Moreover, the scaling laws thereby identified allowed us to define a set of metabolic metrics with prognostic value, thus providing added clinical utility to the base findings.