GRID-BASED CANCER GROWTH SIMULATIONS

In this work we introduce a new numerical method to simulate tumor growth and immune system, by applying an hybrid Cellular Automata-Lattice Boltzmann (CA-LB) approach. The CA-LB approach consists in using a Cellular Automata method to keep track of the immune system and the tumor shape and a Lattice Boltz- mann diffusion formulation to follow the variation of nutrient concentrations in the microenviron- ment of the tumor. The main aim is to use the CA-LB model to describe the interactions between a growing tumor next to a nutrient source and the immune system of the host organism. The starting points are two models independently developed. The first model is a reaction-diffusion model for tumor growth in presence of nutrients. It was improved by with the addition of a probabilistic CA model able to keep track of the immune system response to tumor growths and cell to cell adhesion. The second model is based on a detailed description of the immune system at the cellular level with an agent-based method. The model is successfully used for cancer immunoprevention vaccine applications in mice. However, tumor growth is not modeled in detail and diffusive nutrient effects are missing. The COMETA GRID infrastructure was used as a key access point to simulate several cancer growth scenarios that reproduced different cancer growths observed in clinical cases.