Berlin 2024 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 34: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems III (joint session BP/DY)
BP 34.5: Talk
Friday, March 22, 2024, 10:45–11:00, H 2032
A power-law growth model of pancreatic cancer precursor lesions — Ashley L. Kiemen1, Denis Wirtz1, and •David Zwicker2 — 1Departments of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA — 2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany
Pancreatic cancer often originates from microscopic precursor lesions in the pancreatic ducts. Recent evidence showed that even healthy people possess more and larger lesions than previously believed. A better understanding of the growth of these lesions may thus improve our ability to understand how a minuscule fraction transitions to invasive cancer. Using advanced imaging, we quantified >1,000 lesions and found that lesion size is distributed according to a power law with a fitted exponent of -1.7 over more than three orders of magnitude. To explain these data, we analyze several models of lesion growth and fit the predicted size distributions to the observed data. Our analysis suggests that lesions either (i) grow sub-exponentially and frequently seed new lesions or (ii) grow super-exponentially and frequently merge. Independent genomic mapping of lesions supports both alternatives, suggesting both are relevant. Our work demonstrates how combining experimental measurements of human tissues with dynamic modeling can improve understanding of cancer tumorigenesis.