Simulação em três dimensões da dinâmica de divisão e crescimento celular

Abstract

Recent studies point out a continuous increase in public and private spending on benign and malignant Neoplastic Diseases, also known as tumor and cancer, respectively. In addition to direct costs, with medicines, hospitalizations and surgeries, and indirect costs, resulting from missing work and disability pensions, the disease has a great social impact, especially for the poorest layers of society, who are often unable to make the diagnosis and start treatment of these diseases in their early stages. For this reason, it is essential to increase research investments to better understand the main mechanisms associated to the development of such pathologies, thus allowing achieving the cure of both diseases in the future. Mathematical-computational modeling can be of great help, allowing a large number of hypotheses associated to the start, grow and spread of tumors to be evaluated in a short period of time. This work propose to investigate the mechanical interactions of cell division and the growth of a tumor involving stem-like cells, and their progression into cancer due to the formation and metastasis of pseudopods, which contain cancer stem cells. Using computational modeling, interactions between epithelial and cancerous stem-like cells were simulated, using an open source software called CellSim3D, which represents cells as three-dimensional elastic spheres with elastic, friction, repulsion and attraction forces, as well as osmotic pressure. By changing the repulsion force in cancer stem cells, the attraction force in epithelial cells, and adding biochemical noise, it was possible to observe the formation of pseudopods in the tumor. The computational results were compared to results of in vitro experiments, showing good qualitative compliance with them.