Toward Cancer Chemoprevention: Mathematical Modeling of Chemically Induced Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention

Abstract

Cancer, which is currently rated as the second-leading cause of mortality across the globe, is one of the most hazardous disease groups that has plagued humanity for centuries. The experiments presented here span over two decades and were conducted on a specific species of mice, aiming to neutralize a highly carcinogenic agent by altering its chemical structure when combined with certain compounds. A plethora of growth models, each of which makes use of distinctive qualities, are utilized in the investigation and explanation of the phenomena of chemically induced oncogenesis and prevention. The analysis ultimately results in the formalization of the process of locating the growth model that provides the best descriptive power based on predefined criteria. This is accomplished through a methodological workflow that adopts a computational pipeline based on the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm with pioneering and conventional metrics as well as a ruleset. The developed process simplifies the investigated phenomena as the parameter space of growth models is reduced. The predictability is proven strong in the near future (i.e., a 0.61% difference between the predicted and actual values). The parameters differentiate between active compounds (i.e., classification results reach up to 96% in sensitivity and other performance metrics). The distribution of parameter contribution complements the findings that the logistic growth model is the most appropriate (i.e., 44.47%). In addition, the dosage of chemicals is increased by a factor of two for the next round of trials, which exposes parallel behavior between the two dosages. As a consequence, the study reveals important information on chemoprevention and the cycles of cancer proliferation. If developed further, it might lead to the development of nutritional supplements that completely inhibit the expansion of cancerous tumors. The methodology provided can be used to describe other phenomena that progress over time and it has the power to estimate future results.