On the modeling of heterogeneity in cancer tissue

An important problem in the study of cancer is the understanding of the heterogeneous nature of the cell population. The clonal evolution of the tumor cells results in the tumors being composed of multiple sub-populations. Each sub-population reacts differently to any given therapy. This calls for the development of novel (regulatory network) models, which can accommodate heterogeneity in cancerous tissues. In this paper we present a new approach to model heterogeneity in cancer. We model heterogeneity as an ensemble of deterministic Boolean networks based on prior pathway knowledge. We develop the model considering the use of qPCR data. By observing gene expressions when the tissue is subjected to various stimuli, the compositional breakup of the tissue under study can be determined. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by using our model on synthetic data.