Analysis of intercellular signal transduction in the tumor microenvironment

Recent cancer studies revealed, the interaction between pancreatic cancer cells and pancreatic stellate cells is of importance in the cancer progression. The activation of stellate cells is mediated by some growth factors and cytokines secreted by the cancer cells. In turn, the activated stellate cells will synthesize and secrete multiple growth factors to continuously stimulate the growth of surrounding cancer cells through paracrine pathways. The mechanism behind the evolution of stellate cells from quiescent state to a cancer-associated phenotype is still not well understood.

To systematically investigate the interaction between cancer cells and stellate cells, we constructed a multicellular discrete value model, which is composed of several intracellular and intercellular signaling pathways that are frequently mutated in the pancreatic cancer, to study the cell cycle progression and angiogenesis. We, then, introduced and applied a formal verification technique, Symbolic Model Checking, to automatically analyze the cells' proliferation, angiogenesis and apoptosis in the proposed signal transduction model of tumor microenvironment.

Our studies predicted some important temporal logic properties and dynamic behaviors in the pancreatic cancer cells and stellate cells. The verification technique identified several signaling components, including the RAS, RAGE, AKT, IKK, DVL, RB and PTEN, whose mutation or loss of function can promote cell growth and inhibit apoptosis, some of which have been confirmed by existing experiments. Our formal studies demonstrated that, the bidirectional interaction between cancer cells and stellate cells could significantly increase cell proliferation, inhibit apoptosis, induce tumor angiogenesis, and promote cancer metastasis.