Spatial distribution of motile cells within primary tumors

Determine whether motile cells in primary tumors are formed randomly throughout the tumor or instead concentrate within specific subdomains of the tumor, and ascertain the spatial formation pattern at the onset of clustering to inform modeling and interpretation of cluster dynamics.

Background

The paper models a heterogeneous 2D confluent tumor layer using the Cellular Potts Model, with motile (mesenchymal-like) and non-motile (epithelial-like) cells. To address uncertainty about where motile cells initially appear within a tumor, simulations were run with both random motile-cell distributions and a single strongly aligned motile cluster.

Although the authors verified that, in their simulations, the long-time steady-state clustering did not depend on the initial motile-cell distribution, the actual spatial formation pattern of motile cells in real primary tumors remains unknown. Resolving this uncertainty is important for connecting model assumptions to biological reality and for understanding the initiation and early evolution of collective cluster formation relevant to metastasis.