A mathematical model of the metastatic bottleneck predicts patient outcome and response to cancer treatment.

ABSTRACT: Metastases are the main reason for cancer-related deaths. Initiation of metastases, where newly seeded tumor cells expand into colonies, presents a tremendous bottleneck to metastasis formation. Despite its importance, a quantitative description of metastasis initiation and its clinical implications is lacking. Here, we set theoretical grounds for the metastatic bottleneck with a simple stochastic model. The model assumes that the proliferation-to-death rate ratio for the initiating metastatic cells increases when they are surrounded by more of their kind. For a total of 159,191 patients across 13 cancer types, we found that a single cell has an extremely low median probability of successful seeding of the order of 10-8. With increasing colony size, a sharp transition from very unlikely to

SUBMITTER: Szczurek E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7591057 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature