Abstract SY36-01: Exploiting intra-tumor heterogeneity through agent-based models of tumor growth to infer properties of human malignancies.

Proceedings: AACR 104th Annual Meeting 2013; Apr 6-10, 2013; Washington, DC In recent years, intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) has emerged as a fundamental property of many solid tumors. This feature is the product of cancer evolution and may be implicated in malignant progression and clinical outcome. ITH not only reflects the sequence of malignant events that have occurred in the neoplasm, but it also embeds a signature of the past proliferative history of tumor cells. This signature can be exploited to infer tumor dynamics and to measure properties of the cellular organization that render each cancer distinct. In particular, by integrating multiple types of genomic data derived from different regions of an individual tumor, with a 3-dimensional agent-based model of tumor growth, we can infer clinically relevant cancer parameters directly in human samples. This approach is highly flexible, enabling several malignant processes to be considered, and provides a natural framework with which to interpret the apparent complexity of cancer genomic data, with implications for understanding mechanisms of tumor progression. We demonstrate the utility of this approach on a cohort of breast and colorectal cancers. Citation Format: Andrea Sottoriva, Zhicheng Ma, Haeyoun Kang, Christina Curtis. Exploiting intra-tumor heterogeneity through agent-based models of tumor growth to infer properties of human malignancies. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr SY36-01. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-SY36-01