A growth model for primary cancer

One of the most aggressive phenomena in biology is the growth of cancer cells. In this paper we propose a simple model to simulate the growth of carcinoma “in situ”, which includes cell proliferation, motility and death, as well as the reciprocal influence among cells. Every simulated growth pattern is characterized by its gyration radius, surface roughness, number of cells on tumour periphery and fractal dimension. Our results indicate that the patterns are compact, with gyration radius, surface roughness and number of peripherical cells scaling, in the asymptotic limit, as a square root of the total number of tumour cells. Also, a preliminary comparison between the simulated patterns and explants of primary tumours is done.