A Minimal Model of Cancer Growth, Metastasis and Treatment.

The paper is concerned with modeling cancer growth, metastasis and response to anticancer treatment in a heterogeneous population of patients. Following a discussion of existing models, multicompartmental models are compared using Kaplan-Meier survival curves. Subsequently, different death conditions are analyzed, leading to the final conclusion that a simple, two-compartmental model describes primary and metastatic tumors well enough but death condition must fine-tuned to available clinical survival curves.