The Effect of Over-Feeding in a Computational Model of Tumour Growth

Abstract

This work explores the effects of excess nutrient in an agent-based lattice model of tumour growth. The Non-physiological Evolutionary Algorithm for Tumour Growth (NEATG) model is a platform that has previously been used to explore aspects of tumour regrowth following cytotoxic treatment and the impact of tissue-cell communicative breakdown (anakoinosis) [1]. The model has been shown to recapitulate real-world tumour growth dynamics and display emergent behaviours in line with in vitro tumour systems. This work is motivated by a chance observation during regression testing of the model after refactoring of the code. During this series of tests a number of model runs had shown excessive run-times due to unexpectedly high rates of tumour growth. On investigation it was ascertained that a single model parameter had been mistyped and that the nutrient supply had been set at a supra-physiological level. This study expands on this chance finding to explore the impact of over-feeding on tumour growth dynamics and its relation to response to cytotoxic treatment.