Mathematical modeling of multicellular tumor spheroids quantifies inter-patient and intra-tumor heterogeneity
Journal article, 2025

In the study of brain tumors, patient-derived three-dimensional sphere cultures provide an important tool for studying emerging treatments. The growth of such spheroids depends on the combined effects of proliferation and migration of cells, but it is challenging to make accurate distinctions between increase in cell number versus the radial movement of cells. To address this, we formulate a novel model in the form of a system of two partial differential equations (PDEs) incorporating both migration and growth terms, and show that it more accurately fits our data compared to simpler PDE models. We show that traveling-wave speeds are strongly associated with population heterogeneity. Having fitted the model to our dataset we show that a subset of the cell lines are best described by a “Go-or-Grow”-type model, which constitutes a special case of our model. Finally, we investigate whether our fitted model parameters are correlated with patient age and survival.

Author

Adam Malik

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

University of Gothenburg

Kyle NGuyen

North Carolina State University

John Nardini

The College of New Jersey

Cecilia Krona

Uppsala University

Kevin Flores

North Carolina State University

Sven Nelander

Uppsala University

npj Systems Biology and Applications

20567189 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 1 20

Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)

Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)

Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Other Mathematics

Cell Biology

Computational Mathematics

Areas of Advance

Health Engineering

DOI

10.1038/s41540-025-00492-3

PubMed

39955270

Related datasets

Modeling-Tumor-Spheroids [dataset]

URI: https://github.com/kcnguyen3191/Modeling-Tumor-Spheroids

More information

Latest update

3/14/2025