Cancer is not one disease but many, making it very difficult to successfully develop
treatments that effectively end it. Yet, a very promising approach still underde-
veloped is differentiation therapy (DTH). As it has long been demonstrated, most
tumors are conformed by a cell population a great part of which is poorly differ-
entiated, exhibiting a loss of communication and tissue homeostasis among other
things. As a result, they can achieve several hallmarks essential to their identity
and ...
Cancer is not one disease but many, making it very difficult to successfully develop
treatments that effectively end it. Yet, a very promising approach still underde-
veloped is differentiation therapy (DTH). As it has long been demonstrated, most
tumors are conformed by a cell population a great part of which is poorly differ-
entiated, exhibiting a loss of communication and tissue homeostasis among other
things. As a result, they can achieve several hallmarks essential to their identity
and chances of success. DTH has been proposed to be an efficient therapy and can
be combined with cytotoxic-based therapies, and successfully used as a treatment
for acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). However, DTH has failed so far when deal-
ing with solid tumors. Why? It has been suggested that the high degree of spatial
intra-tumoral heterogeneity combined with the resilience of CSCs and their capa-
bility to repopulate tumors by themselves might act as a firewall to DTH drugs. In
order to test this possibility and assess the effects of DTH on solid tumors, we pro-
pose a mathematical and computational study of DTH using a spatially extended
avascular tumor model. The results obtained support the previous hypothesis and
indirect evidence concerning the role of space and cancer tissue architecture.
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