A continuous phenotype space model of cancer evolution

Abstract

It was suggested that the ability of cancer to avoid immune response pressure (that should be expected to be capable to annihilate cancer at its early stage) can be attributed to the ability of the cancer cells to evolve. The goal of this notice is to illustrate this possibility by the means of mathematical modelling. In this notice, we construct a simple mechanistic model of cancer evolution, which is based upon a classical model of cancer-immune response interaction. Numerical simulations confirm the hypothesis that if cancer mutates fast enough and if immune response is not sufficiently strong, then cancer is able to avoid immune response pressure by evolution.