Lest anyone be too geeked out, here is the guts of the thing:
"The central finding of this work is that tumor growth and invasion
are not erratic or unpredictable, or solely explained through
genomic and molecular events, but rather are predictable processes
obeying biophysical laws, driven by microenvironmental substrate
gradients, and regulated by genotypic, phenotypic, and microenvironmental
parameters (e.g., cell adhesion, proliferation, and motility).
The model enables quantitative study of invading cell clusters
as functional units that move as complex systems. Substrate
gradients, e.g., of nutrient, oxygen, growth factors, and metabolites,
result from diffusion, cellular activity, and heterogeneous
delivery and removal. This leads to local hypoxia, nutrient
starvation, acidosis, necrosis, and the pleiomorphic appearance
of tumors. The underlying physical mechanism of collective cell
migration, i.e., a gross tumor morphologic instability (
2,
8–
10,
12–
14,
40), maximizes cell exposure to substrates by evading
a compact, nearly spherical morphology in favor of infiltrating
shapes moving up gradients of substrates such as oxygen. Phenotypic
changes that increase nutrient uptake and augment cell proliferation
(and also increase cell motility and reduce adhesion) have a
quantifiable effect on morphology at the tumor scale. In particular,
they trigger invasive fingering into host tissue while inducing
necrosis and angiogenesis for certain parameter conditions.
"
Hopeful