Modelling tumour growth and progression

To develop the path that goes from the clinical experience to the laboratories and back to the clinic, research in cancer modelling need the establishment of strong interactions among dierent branches of science and a genuinely multidisciplinary approach. In fact, starting from very practical situations this path passes through progressive abstractions and simplication steps to gain insight into the complex phenomena occurring during tumour evolution and growth and this involves dierent research areas (see Fig. 1). So, from the phenomenological observation of a certain phenomenon in real patients, scientists in bio-medicine try to conceive more handy, reproducible, and relatively harmless biological models, which can be in vivo (e.g., mouse, chicken embryo) or in vitro. They then perform a series of experiments on that model. Either directly from the phenomenological observation or from the biological model, mathematicians and physicists can generate mathemat-ical models aimed at describing the phenomenon of interest. The simulations stemming from them are usually called in silico models by the biologists