Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada.
Semin Cancer Biol. 2012 Oct;22(5-6):374-8. doi: 10.1016/j.semcancer.2012.04.005. Epub 2012 Apr 23.
The last decade has witnessed significant advances in the application of mathematical and computational models to biological systems, especially to cancer biology. Here, we present stochastic and deterministic models describing tumour growth based on the cancer stem cell hypothesis, and discuss the application of these models to the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. In particular, we discuss how such quantitative approaches can be used to validate different possible scenarios that can lead to an increase in stem cell activity following induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition, observed in recent experimental studies on human breast cancer and related cell lines. The utility of comparing mammosphere data to computational mammosphere simulations in elucidating the growth characteristics of mammary (cancer) stem cells is discussed as well.
过去十年见证了数学和计算模型在生物系统中的应用取得了重大进展，尤其是在癌症生物学领域。在这里，我们提出了基于癌症干细胞假说描述肿瘤生长的随机和确定性模型，并讨论了这些模型在上皮-间充质转化中的应用。特别是，我们讨论了如何使用这些定量方法来验证不同的可能情况，这些情况可能会导致上皮-间充质转化后干细胞活性的增加，这在最近关于人类乳腺癌和相关细胞系的实验研究中已经观察到。还讨论了将乳腺球数据与计算乳腺球模拟进行比较在阐明乳腺（癌症）干细胞生长特征方面的作用。
