Emerging Tumor Development by Simulating Single-cell Events

Despite decades of substantial research, cancer remains a ubiquitous scourge in the industrialized world. Effective treatments require a thorough understanding of macroscopic cancerous tumor growth out of individual cells. Clinical imaging methods, however, only detect late-stage macroscopic tumors, while many quantitative experiments focus on small clusters of cancerous cells in microscopic detail but struggle to grow full tumors . Here, we introduce the critical scale-bridging link between both these scopes. We are able to simulate the growth of mm-sized tumors composed of 1.5 million m-resolved individual cells by employing highly parallelized code on a supercomputer. We observe the competition for resources and space, which can lead to hypoxic or necrotic tissue regions. Cellular mutations and tumor stem cells can lead to tissue heterogeneity and change tumor properties. We probe the effects of different chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments and observe selective pressure. This improved theoretical understanding of cancer growth as emerging behavior from single-cells opens new avenues for various scientific fields, ranging from developing better early-stage cancer detection devices to testing treatment regimes for personalized medicine.