A stochastic model for cancer metastasis: branching stochastic process with settlement.

Abstract

We introduce a new stochastic model for metastatic growth, which takes the form of a branching stochastic process with settlement. The moving particles are interpreted as clusters of cancer cells, while stationary particles correspond to micro-tumours and metastases. The analysis of expected particle location, their locational variance, the furthest particle distribution and the extinction probability leads to a common type of differential equation, namely, a non-local integro-differential equation with distributed delay. We prove global existence and uniqueness results for this type of equation. The solutions' asymptotic behaviour for long time is characterized by an explicit index, a metastatic reproduction number $R_0$: metastases spread for $R_{0}>1$ and become extinct for $R_{0}<1$. Using metastatic data from mouse experiments, we show the suitability of our framework to model metastatic cancer.