Bio-Mechanical Model of Osteosarcoma Tumor Microenvironment: A Porous Media Approach

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone cancer seen in children to young adults with poor prognosis. To find effective treatments, it is crucial to understand the mechanism of the initiation and progression of the osteosarcoma tumors. In this paper, we introduce a PDE model for the progression of osteosarcoma tumors by considering the location of different cell types, including immune and cancer cells, in the tumors. We perform several simulations using the developed model to investigate the importance and role of the different immune cells’ location in the growth of the tumors. The results show that the co-localization of macrophages and cancer cells promotes tumors’ growth. ABSTRACT: Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant bone tumor in children and adolescents with a poor prognosis. To describe the progression of osteosarcoma, we expanded a system of data-driven ODE from a previous study into a system of Reaction-Diffusion-Advection (RDA) equations and coupled it with Biot equations of poroelasticity to form a bio-mechanical model. The RDA system includes the spatio-temporal information of the key components of the tumor microenvironment. The Biot equations are comprised of an equation for the solid phase, which governs the movement of the solid tumor, and an equation for the fluid phase, which relates to the motion of cells. The model predicts the total number of cells and cytokines of the tumor microenvironment and simulates the tumor’s size growth. We simulated different scenarios using this model to investigate the impact of several biomedical settings on tumors’ growth. The results indicate the importance of macrophages in tumors’ growth. Particularly, we have observed a high co-localization of macrophages and cancer cells, and the concentration of tumor cells increases as the number of macrophages increases.