Emergence of Anti-Cancer Drug Resistance: Exploring the Importance of the Microenvironmental Niche via a Spatial Model

Abstract

Practically, all chemotherapeutic agents lead to drug resistance. Clinically, it is a challenge to determine whether resistance arises prior to, or as a result of, cancer therapy. Further, a number of different intracellular and microenvironmental factors have been correlated with the emergence of drug resistance. With the goal of better understanding drug resistance and its connection with the tumor microenvironment, we have developed a hybrid discrete-continuous mathematical model. In this model, cancer cells described through a particle-spring approach respond to dynamically changing oxygen and DNA damaging drug concentrations described through partial differential equations. We thoroughly explored the behavior of our self-calibrated model under the following common conditions: a fixed layout of the vasculature, an identical initial configuration of cancer cells, the same mechanism of drug action, and one mechanism of cellular response to the drug. We considered one set of simulations in which drug resistance existed prior to the start of treatment, and another set in which drug resistance is acquired in response to treatment. This allows us to compare how both kinds of resistance influence the spatial and temporal dynamics of the developing tumor, and its clonal diversity. We show that both pre-existing and acquired resistance can give rise to three biologically distinct parameter regimes: successful tumor eradication, reduced effectiveness of drug during the course of treatment (resistance), and complete treatment failure. When a drug resistant tumor population forms from cells that acquire resistance, we find that the spatial component of our model (the microenvironment) has a significant impact on the transient and long-term tumor behavior. On the other hand, when a resistant tumor population forms from pre-existing resistant cells, the microenvironment only has a minimal transient impact on treatment response. Finally, we present evidence that the microenvironmental niches of low drug/sufficient oxygen and low drug/low oxygen play an important role in tumor cell survival and tumor expansion. This may play role in designing new therapeutic agents or new drug combination schedules.

Microenvironmental Niches and Sanctuaries: A Route to Acquired Resistance

“…The work presented in this chapter is a more detailed analysis of one particular example from the model developed by us in [16]. We considered a tumor with a parameter Δ death (defining how cell tolerance to drug-induced damage is changing) equal to 9.5×10 −5 , which we previously showed to be in a parameter regime that results in the emergence of a drug resistant tumor.…”

“…For simplicity, we do not include other microenvironmental components, such as stromal cells and other metabolites. More details of the model, its implementation, and the parameter self-calibration can be found in [16]. …”

A mathematical approach to differentiate spontaneous and induced evolution to drug resistance during cancer treatment

“…For instance, nitrogen mustards can induce base substitutions and chromosomal rearrangements, topoisomerase II inhibitors can induce chromosomal translocations, and antimetabolites can induce double stranded breaks and chromosomal aberrations [73]. Such drug-induced genomic alterations would generally be non-reversible, and a handful of mathematical models have considered this type of drug-induced resistance [29,49,68,1,20]. Drug resistance can also be induced at the epigenetic level via DNA methylation and histone modification [62,65].…”

“…Mathematical modeling studies in particular have been used to explore both broad and detailed aspects of cancer drug resistance, as reviewed in [43,7,25]. The fundamental question of how the presence of drug resistant cells influences tumor dynamics and treatment outcomes has been thoroughly explored in mathematical models under a wide variety of assumptions [14,37,39,47,58,40,23,24,70,16,45,60,63,4,22,33,44,52,65,3,32,80,13,26,29,46,49,51,57,59,77,18,68,1,9,10,20]. Cancer models have also been utilized to assess how various underlying mechanisms contribute to the resistant phenotype [80,13,59,18,20], and to calculate the probability that drug resistance emerges within a specified time frame, be it before or during cancer treatment …”

“…As examples, pre-existing BCR-ABL kinase domain mutations confer resistance to the tyrosine kinase inhibitor imatinib in chronic myeloid leukemia patients [66,36], and pre-existing MEK1 mutations confer resistance to BRAF inhibitors in melanoma patients [8]. Many mathematical models have considered how the presence of preexisting resistant cells impact cancer progression and treatment [37,39,58,40,23,24,70,16,60,63,4,22,44,3,32,80,29,49,57,59,77,68,9,10].On the other hand, acquired drug resistance broadly describes the case in which drug resistance develops during the course of therapy from a population of cells that were initially drug sensitive [34]. The term "acquired resistance" is really an umbrella term for two distinct phenomena, which complicates the study of acquired resistance.…”