Abstract or Additional Information
Mechanisms of cancer progression are evolutinary processes in which cells with fitness advantge gained by an unwanted somatic mutations can take over a small niche and initiate clonal expansion. Cancer stem cell hypothesis states that cancer stem cells are the only subpopulation of cells in a tumour (or neoplasm) that are able to initiate a new tumour. Ubiquiteous proliferation scheme of stem cells let them not only to replenish their own population but also nourish the popultion of non-stem tumour cells in a heirarchal form and create strong epigenetic heterogenity in tumours. In this talk we discuss a noble stochastic evolutioanry model of cancer stem cell selection dynamics as a generalization of constant population Moran-type models . We derive a replicator dynamics for such multi-species model and calculate average time-to-fixation of cancer stem cells. We show that in the presence of plasticity among non-stem cells (a known feature of all cancer cell types) the effective fitness of cancer stem cells is a funciton of both proliferation rate and plastcity, thus a previously dsiadvantageous cancer stem cell becomes an advantageous phenotype in the presence of plasticity. We will breifly discuss some game theoretical aspects of the above model and effcets of microenvironment as an evolutionary process on a spatial structure.