In silico modelling of a cancer stem cell-targeting agent and its effects on tumour control during radiotherapy

Head and neck cancers (HNC), like most solid tumours, contain a subpopulation of cancer stem cells (CSC) that are commonly responsible for treatment failure. Conventional therapies are unsuccessful in controlling CSCs, thus novel, targeting therapies are needed. A promising agent is ATRA (All-trans-retinoic acid) that was shown to induce CSC differentiation, cell cycle redistribution and CSCs radiosensitisation. To add to the limited data, this work simulated the effects of ATRA on a virtual HNC and evaluated tumour response to radiotherapy. A Monte Carlo technique was employed to grow a HNC consisting of all lineages of cancer cells. The biologically realistic input parameters led to a pre-treatment CSC population of 5.9%. The Linear Quadratic model was employed to simulate radiotherapy. ATRA-induced differentiation, cell arrest and apoptosis were modelled, based on literature data. While the effect of differentiation was marginal, the strongest influence on CSC subpopulation was displayed by ATRA’s cell arrest effect via an exponential behaviour of the dose-response curve. The apoptotic effect induced by ATRA shows linear correlation between the percentage of apoptotic cells and dose required to eradicate CSCs. In conclusion, ATRA is a potent CSC-targeting agent with viable impact on tumour control when combined with radiotherapy.