Physical and mechanical effects of cancer growth in 3D volume

Abstract

Cell cultures grown in 3D is said to exhibit difference in growth properties to their 2D counterpart. In this study, we simulated growth of cancer cells in 3D volume using a geometric model called centroidal Voronoi tessellation. We apply similar approaches for simulating cancer cells in their 2D counterpart and compare the physical evolution of cells and mechanical effects of cancer growth in a 2D tissue. We observed differences in the sizes of cancer cells when grown in 3D and 2D. Cancer cells in 3D are shown to have almost the same size distribution with normal cells unlike in 2D. Furthermore, cancer cells in 3D still exhibits power-law relation with exponent α between the magnitude of the mechanical stress experience by the normal cell |σ| and its distance from the tumor boundary d_C. The power-law exponent α is also a concave function of the cancer population n_C, similar to the 2D with, however, a different minimum.