Scale-free correlations and potential criticality in weakly ordered populations of brain cancer cells

Collective behavior spans several orders of magnitude of biological organization, from cell colonies to flocks of birds. We used time-resolved tracking of individual glioblastoma cells to investigate collective motion in an ex vivo model of glioblastoma. At the population level, glioblastoma cells display weakly polarized motion in the (directional) velocities of single cells. Unexpectedly, fluctuations in velocities are correlated over distances many times the size of a cell. Correlation lengths scale linearly with the maximum end-to-end length of the population, indicating that they are scale-free and lack a characteristic decay scale other than the size of the system. Last, a data-driven maximum entropy model captures statistical features of the experimental data with only two free parameters: the effective length scale (n(c)) and strength (J) of local pairwise interactions between tumor cells. These results show that glioblastoma assemblies exhibit scale-free correlations in the absence of polarization, suggesting that they may be poised near a critical point.