ACESO: A 3D Agent-Based Simulation of the Interaction Between Immune and Tumor Cells.

Immunotherapy consists of assisting or augmenting the immune system to prevent or treat diseases and has shown great promise in improving upon the conventional methods of treating cancer, namely radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and surgery [2]. However, conducting preclinical studies in this field can take months to years and often require costly equipment and training to execute. Researchers have used in-silico methods to reduce the time to conduct these studies, computationally exploring many different experimental configurations in a fraction of the time needed in a wet lab [1]. A common method used to describe the interaction of the immune system with tumor cells is through ordinary and partial differential equations of the evolution in the populations, but these top-down approaches often cannot capture the necessary detail required to understand the dynamics that operate at the cellular level [3]. Appropriately, studies that approach these systems from the bottom-up, particularly agent-based simulations, have shown success in capturing the dynamics of cell-to-cell interactions [4].