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Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth in human cancers

Victor Pérez-García 1 Gabriel Calvo 1 Jesús Bosque 1 Odelaisy León-Triana 1 Juan Jiménez 1 Julián Pérez-Beteta 1 Juan Belmonte-Beitia 1 Manuel Valiente 2 Lucía Zhu 2 Pedro García-Gómez 2 Pilar Sánchez-Gómez 3 Esther Hernández-San Miguel 3 Rafael Hortigüela 3 Youness Azimzade 4 David Molina-García 1 Álvaro Martínez 1 Ángel Acosta Rojas 5 Ana Ortiz de Mendivil 5 François Vallette 6 Philippe Schucht 7 Michael Murek 7 María Pérez-Cano 1 David Albillo 8 Antonio Honguero Martínez 9 Germán Jiménez Londoño 10 Estanislao Arana 11 Ana García Vicente 10
1 UCLM - Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
2 CNIO - Spanish National Cancer Research Centre [Madrid, Spain]
3 Institute of Health Carlos III
4 University of Tehran
5 Sanchinarro University Hospita [HM Hospitales, Madrid]
6 CRCINA-ÉQUIPE 9 - Apoptosis and Tumor Progression
CRCINA - Centre de Recherche en Cancérologie et Immunologie Nantes-Angers
7 Inselspital - Bern University Hospital [Berne]
8 MD Anderson Cancer Center [Madrid, Spain]
9 Hospital General Universitario de Albacete
10 Hospital General Universitario de Ciudad Real [Ciudad Real, Spain]
11 Fundación Instituto Valenciano de Oncología [Valencia, Spain]
Abstract : Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities that are composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws that relate an observable quantity to a measure of the size of the system. Here, we describe the discovery of universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers. This dependence underpins increasing tumour aggressiveness, owing to evolutionary dynamics, that leads to an explosive growth as the disease progresses. We validated this dynamic using longitudinal volumetric data of different histologies from large cohorts of patients with cancer. To explain our observations we tested complex, biologically inspired mathematical models that describe the key processes that govern tumour growth. Our models predict that the emergence of superlinear allometric scaling laws is an inherently three-dimensional phenomenon. Moreover, the scaling laws that we identified allowed us to define a set of metabolic metrics with prognostic value, which adds clinical utility to our findings.
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https://www.hal.inserm.fr/inserm-02913972
Contributor : Elizabeth Bernardo <>
Submitted on : Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - 8:20:41 AM
Last modification on : Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - 3:25:14 AM

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Victor Pérez-García, Gabriel Calvo, Jesús Bosque, Odelaisy León-Triana, Juan Jiménez, et al.. Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth in human cancers. Nature Physics, Nature Publishing Group, 2020, Online ahead of print. ⟨10.1038/s41567-020-0978-6⟩. ⟨inserm-02913972⟩

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