A Spatially Resolved Mechanistic Growth Law for Cancer Drug Development Predicting Tumor Growing Fractions

Mathematical models used in preclinical drug discovery tend to be empirical growth laws. Such models are well suited to fitting the data available, mostly longitudinal studies of tumor volume; however, they typically have little connection with the underlying physiologic processes. This lack of a mechanistic underpinning restricts their flexibility and potentially inhibits their translation across studies including from animal to human. Here we present a mathematical model describing tumor growth for the evaluation of single-agent cytotoxic compounds that is based on mechanistic principles. The model can predict spatial distributions of cell subpopulations and account for spatial drug distribution effects within tumors. Importantly, we demonstrate that the model can be reduced to a growth law similar in form to the ones currently implemented in pharmaceutical drug development for preclinical trials so that it can integrated into the current workflow. We validate this approach for both cell-derived xenograft and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) data. This shows that our theoretical model fits as well as the best performing and most widely used models. However, in addition, the model is also able to accurately predict the observed growing fraction of tumours. Our work opens up current preclinical modeling studies to also incorporating spatially resolved and multimodal data without significant added complexity and creates the opportunity to improve translation and tumor response predictions. SIGNIFICANCE: This theoretical model has the same mathematical structure as that currently used for drug development. However, its mechanistic basis enables prediction of growing fraction and spatial variations in drug distribution.