Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth in human cancers.

ABSTRACT: Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a measure of the size of the system. Here we describe the discovery of universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers. This dependence underpins increasing tumour aggressiveness, due to evolutionary dynamics, which leads to an explosive growth as the disease progresses. We validated this dynamic using longitudinal volumetric data of different histologies from large cohorts of cancer patients. To explain our observations we put forward increasingly-complex biologically-inspired mathematical models that captured the key processes governing tumor gr

SUBMITTER: Perez-Garcia VM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7116451 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature