A team of Spanish scientists has been able to mathematically describe how metastasis begins and have developed a model that could help improve treatments for wound healing, organ regeneration or better understand the evolution of cancer.
Researchers at the universities of Carlos III and Complutense in Madrid described mathematically how a tumor invades epithelial cells and automatically quantifies the evolution of the tumor and the islands of cells that remain behind it.
The model they developed could be used to better understand the cellular biophysical characteristics that are involved in developing new treatments for wound healing, organ regeneration or cancer progression, Carlos III University reported in a note released today.
The research examines the collective movement of cells in tissues, a process that, in addition to being essential in pathological developments, such as tumor invasion and metastases play a key role in physiological processes, such as wound healing, embryonic development or tissue reconstruction.
The researchers, who published their findings in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, used a combination of mathematical modeling, numerical simulations, and topological analysis of data from simulations and experiments to understand how cancer cells invade healthy cells.
“A simplification of the early stages of cancer metastasis is that tumor cells move as a group and move a group of normal cells into healthy tissue,” said study authors Luis Lopez Bonilla and Carolina Trenado of the University’s Department of Mathematics. Carlos III and Ana Carpio, from the Complutense Department of Applied Mathematics.
“By selecting the right cell groups and using the right software, we were able to simulate the invasion that occurs in healthy tissue by cancer cells “, the scientists pointed out.
To automatically track the evolution of the barrier or boundary between cancer and normal cells, the researchers used topological data analysis techniques, which is used for the first time in this type of study.
“Starting from a series of successive images from the experiments and also from the numerical simulations, the topological changes of the interfaces were grouped, represented and classified automatically as the cancer cells advance,” say the scientists.
The techniques developed in this paper can be scaled up to a large volume of data if these studies are performed on a larger scale, according to the researchers, who ensured that the same techniques could be relevant in the field. tissue bioengineering to study how it affects the biophysical characteristics of different materials organ and tissue regeneration.