Dario Panada Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

Developing a Model to Investigate the Extent to Which Enhanced Acidity in Tumour Environments Facilitates Cancer Development

Supervised by D.Walker

Abstract

Cancer is regarded as one of the deadliest diseases, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. A phenomenon observed in cancer cells is their change in metabolism from aerobic to anaerobic activity. This, in turn, results in the acidification of regions occupied by tumour masses and has been hypothesized to facilitate cancer expansion. If this was the case, targeting cancer metabolism could become part of anti-cancer therapies and have an important role in cancer containment and eradication.

In this research, we designed and implemented an agent-based model to simulate the growth and development of tumour masses in regions originally occupied by healthy tissues. Our model allowed to compare the growth of cell populations in the presence and absence of enhanced acidity, hence providing useful information to determine whether enhanced acidity facilitates cancer expansion.

Statistical methods were used to produce mathematical models to fit the data obtained from our simulation and analyse differences in growth rates observed in the presence and absence of enhanced acidity. Ultimately, our investigation suggested that there is no significant difference between rates of cancer expansion grown in the presence and absence of enhanced acidity.