Cells, cancer, and rare events: homeostatic metastability in stochastic nonlinear dynamical models of skin cell proliferation.

A recently proposed model for skin cell proliferation [E. Clayton, Nature (London) 446, 185 (2007)] is extended to incorporate mitotic autoregulation, and hence homeostasis as a fixed point of the dynamics. Unlimited cell proliferation in such a model can be viewed as a model for carcinogenesis. One way in which this can arise is homeostatic metastability, in which the cell populations escape from the homeostatic basin of attraction by a large but rare stochastic fluctuation. Such an event can be viewed as the final step in a multistage model of carcinogenesis. Homeostatic metastability offers a possible explanation for the peculiar epidemiology of lung cancer in ex-smokers.