A 3D multiscale model of cancer stem cell in tumor development

BACKGROUND: Recent reports indicate that a subgroup of tumor cells named cancer stem cells (CSCs) or tumor initiating cells (TICs) are responsible for tumor initiation, growth and drug resistance. This subgroup of tumor cells has self-renewal capacity and could differentiate into heterogeneous tumor cell populations through asymmetric proliferation. The idea of CSC provides informative insights into tumor initiation, metastasis and treatment. However, the underlying mechanisms of CSCs regulating tumor behaviors are unclear due to the complex cancer system. To study the functions of CSCs in the complex tumor system, a few mathematical modeling studies have been proposed. Whereas, the effect of microenvironment (mE) factors, the behaviors of CSCs, progenitor tumor cells (PCs) and differentiated tumor cells (TCs), and the impact of CSC fraction and signaling heterogeneity, are not adequately explored yet. METHODS: In this study, a novel 3D multi-scale mathematical modeling is proposed to investigate the behaviors of CSCsin tumor progressions. The model integrates CSCs, PCs, and TCs together with a few essential mE factors. With this model, we simulated and investigated the tumor development and drug response under different CSC content and heterogeneity. RESULTS: The simulation results shown that the fraction of CSCs plays a critical role in driving the tumor progression and drug resistance. It is also showed that the pure chemo-drug treatment was not a successful treatment, as it resulted in a significant increase of the CSC fraction. It further shown that the self-renew heterogeneity of the initial CSC population is a cause of the heterogeneity of the derived tumors in terms of the CSC fraction and response to drug treatments. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed 3D multi-scale model provides a new tool for investigating the behaviors of CSC in CSC-initiated tumors, which enables scientists to investigate and generate testable hypotheses about CSCs in tumor development and drug response under different microenvironments and drug perturbations.