This paper examines some basic aspects of the inter action of transport and cellular dynamics. As a first step, the model is formulated on a simplified geometry of tumour vasculature, in which explicit coupling of blood flow between vascular and interstitial space is incorporated, along with drug transport. license with Pfizer The effects of anticancer drugs are addressed by integrating the above with dynamics of intracellular apoptosis signalling. The integrated model is used to evaluate treatment strategies and to analyse other factors that may influence the response of tumour cells, in order to provide insights into the complex interplay between the different processes involved. Methods For mathematical modelling of drug transport, a commonly adopted approach is to avoid an explicit representation of the tumour vasculature which, instead, is treated as a distributed source term in the governing equations.

In doing so, descriptions of transport processes are incomplete without accounting for vascular transport and the spatial relationship between blood vessels and tumour interstitium. However, incorporating realistic tumour vasculature geometry is highly challenging, given the fact that the tumour vasculature is abnormal, irregular and heterogeneous. Further complexities in evaluating drug effects are added when dynamic intracellular signalling processes are incorporated, which are triggered in response to spatio temporal drug stimuli and exhibit highly non linear dynamics.

To obtain clear cut and transparent insights into transport mechanisms, cellular signalling Brefeldin_A and their interaction, we employ the modelling framework as an in silico experimental platform which describes a well defined tumour drug system with minimal essential elements, definite information flow and a controlled source of variability and heterogeneity. The in silico experimental platform depicts an idealized tumour with no heterogeneity, in a simplified geometry. This setup is designed as an initial effort to contain the minimal components Binimetinib necessary for un derstanding the effects of drugs on tumours and elucidating the effects of transport and cellular factors in a transparent manner without consideration of other factors. Computational geometry The model consists of a single blood vessel surrounded by the tumour interstitium, which is a simplified representa tion also employed in previous studies. Although the geometrical configuration is similar to that of a tumour cord model, they differ in size in that the present model mimics the entire transport domain in the tumour tissue.