Analysis of behaviour transitions in tumour growth using a cellular automaton simulation

The authors used computational biology as an approach for analysing the emergent dynamics of tumour growth at cellular level. They applied cellular automata for modelling the behaviour of cells when the main cancer cell hallmarks are present. Their model is oriented to mimic the development of multicellular spheroids of tumour cells. In their modelling, cells have a genome associated with the different cancer hallmarks, indicating if those are acquired as a consequence of mutations. The presence of the cancer hallmarks defines cell states and cell mitotic behaviours. These hallmarks are associated with a series of parameters, and depending on their values and the activation of the hallmarks in each of the cells, the system can evolve to different dynamics. With the simulation tool the authors performed an analysis of the first phases of cancer growth, using different and alternative strategies: firstly, studying the evolution of cancer cells and hallmarks in different representative situations regarding initial conditions and parameters, analysing the relative importance of the hallmarks for tumour progression; secondly, being the focus of this work, inspecting the behaviour transitions when the cancer cells are killed with a given probability during the cellular system progression.