Stress generation, relaxation and size control in confined tumor growth.

ABSTRACT: Experiments on tumor spheroids have shown that compressive stress from their environment can reversibly decrease tumor expansion rates and final sizes. Stress release experiments show that nonuniform anisotropic elastic stresses can be distributed throughout. The elastic stresses are maintained by structural proteins and adhesive molecules, and can be actively relaxed by a variety of biophysical processes. In this paper, we present a new continuum model to investigate how the growth-induced elastic stresses and active stress relaxation, in conjunction with cell size control feedback machinery, regulate the cell density and stress distributions within growing tumors as well as the tumor sizes in the presence of external physical confinement and gradients of growth-promoting chemical fields.

SUBMITTER: Yan H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8726498 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature