Analyzing the Effects of Cell Proliferation on the Evolution of Cancerous Systems

Cancer is a disease that takes the lives of almost 10 million people every year, and due to humans’ nature as multicellular organisms, it is both inevitable and incurable. Therefore, management of the disease is of utmost importance. Due to the complexity of cancer and its development, numerous computational models have been developed that allow for precise diagnostic and management input. This experiment uses one of these said models, CancerSim, to evaluate the effect of proliferation rates on the order in which the hallmarks of cancer evolve in the simulations. To do this, the simulation is run with initial telomere length increased to simulate the effects of more living cells proliferating at every time step. The results of this experiment show no significant effect of initial telomere length on the order that hallmarks evolved, but all simulations ended with cancers that were dominant with cells that contained limitless replication and evade apoptosis hallmarks. These results may have been affected by limitations in the CancerSim model such as the inability to model metastasis and the lack of a robust angiogenesis solution. This study reveals how individual cell characteristics may not have a large effect on cancer evolution, but rather individual hallmarks can affect evolution significantly. Further studies with a revised version of CancerSim or another model could confirm the behavior demonstrated in this experiment