Stochastic Models For De-differentiation In Hierarchical Tumor Tissues

Tumor is a kind of disease that has been seriously harmful to human health for a long time.Since the middle of last century,cancer stem cell theory has attracted much attention.The traditional theory of cancer stem.cells believes that tumor tissues are hierarchical,and that cancer stem cells have the highest differentiation potential and generate downstream tumor cells through cell differentiation.However,more and more research results show that there is de-differentiation phenomenon,which can restore the differentiated tumor cells to tumor stem cell phenotype.In order to study the phenomenon of de-differentiation,we established a stochastic process model with the mechanism of de-differentiation.This model takes the coefficient of variation of the number of tumor stem cells as the research object,and observed the variation of the coefficient of variation with the parameters of de-differentiation.Our numerical results and simulation results show that the mean and variance of tumor stem cells increase gradually with the increase of the parameters of de-differentiation,but the coefficient of variation decreases gradually.This result suggests that the mechanism of de-differentiation can reduce the noise level of tumor stem cells.