Scaling Laws in Cancer The Dynamic Behaviour of the Power Exponent p.pdfVIP

C. Guiot et al.: “Scaling Laws in Cancer” Scaling Laws in Cancer: The Dynamic Behaviour of the Power Exponent p Caterina Guiot 1,2 , Pier Paolo Delsanto 2,3, Yuri Mansury 4 and Thomas S. Deisboeck 4,* 1 2 Affiliations: Dip. Neuroscience, Università di Torino, Italy and INFM, sezioni di Torino Università e Politecnico, Italy ; 3 Dip. Fisica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; 4 Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory, Harvard-MIT (HST) Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA. * Corresponding Author: Thomas S. Deisboeck, M.D. Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory (CBML) Harvard-MIT (HST) Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging Massachusetts General Hospital-East, 2301 Bldg. 149, 13th Street Charlestown, MA 02129 Tel: 617-724-1845 Fax: 617-726-5079 Email: deisboec@helix.mgh.harvard.edu Abstract We have previously reported that a ‘universal’ growth law with fixed scaling exponent p , as proposed by West and collaborators for all living organisms, appears to be able to describe also the growth of tumors in vivo. Here, we investigate in more detail the dynamic behaviour of p using data from the literature. We show that p initially decreases before it again increases up to or even beyond 3/4. These results support the notion that p can vary over time and yet its dynamics are independent from the cancer type. We argue that this behaviour reflects the underlying evolving tumorigenesis in that the minimum of p signals the emergence of a fractal-like distribution network corresponding to the ‘angiogenetic switch’ towards a perfusion -dominated nutrient supply mechanism.