Speaker
Description
Cancer cells in the GBM microenvironment often experience stress due to multiple sources, primarily hypoxia (low nutrient availability, i.e., low oxygen and other nutrients components) and therapeutic interventions such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Indeed, while cellular death is the main intended outcome of therapeutic strategies, this also occurs within excessive hypoxic regions (such as necrotic zones) even in the absence of therapy. However, both of these two means that lead to cell death, turn out to be major sources of stress for the GBM cells ecosystem, triggering phenotypic cell adaptations, including the development of resistance to therapy. To address this from a modelling point of view, in this work we propose a multiscale moving boundary framework to explore the cellular stress state within the tumour cell population and its implications in terms of tumour mutations and emerging resistant cells subpopulations. This modelling is then extended to account for the broader metabolic profile of the GBM tumour microenvironment.
