Mechano-transduction in tumour growth modelling.

The evolution of biological systems is strongly influenced by physical factors, such as applied forces, geometry or the stiffness of the micro-environment. Mechanical changes are particularly important in solid tumour development, as altered stromal-epithelial interactions can provoke a persistent increase in cytoskeletal tension, driving the gene expression of a malignant phenotype. In this work, we propose a novel multi-scale treatment of mechano-transduction in cancer growth. The avascular tumour is modelled as an expanding elastic spheroid, whilst growth may occur both as a volume increase and as a mass production within a cell rim. Considering the physical constraints of an outer healthy tissue, we derive the thermo-dynamical requirements for coupling growth rate, solid stress and diffusing biomolecules inside a heterogeneous tumour. The theoretical predictions successfully reproduce the stress-dependent growth curves observed by in vitro experiments on multicellular spheroids.

Dispersion relations and wave operators in self-similar quasicontinuous linear chains.

We construct self-similar functions and linear operators to deduce a self-similar variant of the Laplacian operator and of the D'Alembertian wave operator. The exigence of self-similarity as a symmetry property requires the introduction of nonlocal particle-particle interactions. We derive a self-similar linear wave operator describing the dynamics of a quasicontinuous linear chain of infinite length with a spatially self-similar distribution of nonlocal interparticle springs. The self-similarity of the nonlocal harmonic particle-particle interactions results in a dispersion relation of the form of a Weierstrass-Mandelbrot function that exhibits self-similar and fractal features. We also derive a continuum approximation, which relates the self-similar Laplacian to fractional integrals, and yields in the low-frequency regime a power-law frequency-dependence of the oscillator density.

Two approaches to study essentially nonlinear and dispersive properties of the internal structure of materials.

It is shown that essentially nonlinear models for solids with complex internal structure may be studied using phenomenological and proper structural approaches. It is found that both approaches give rise to the same nonlinear equation for traveling longitudinal macrostrain waves. However, presence of the connection between macro- and microfields in the proper structural model prevents a realization of some important solutions. First, it is obtained that simultaneous existence of compression and tensile waves is impossible in contrast to the phenomenological approach. Then, it is found that correlation between macro- and internal strains gives rise to the crucial influence of the velocity of the macrostrain wave on the existence of either compression or tensile localized strain waves. Also, it is shown that similar profiles of the macrostrain solitary waves may be accompanied by distinct profiles of the microstrain waves. Finally, the dispersion curves for the waves belong to the different branches. This is important for internal structural deviations caused by the dynamical loading due to the localized macrostrain wave propagation and demonstrates a need in the development of the proper structural approaches relative to the phenomenological ones.

Propagation of localized longitudinal strain waves in a plate in the presence of cubic nonlinearity.

Possible propagating longitudinal strain solitary waves in a plate are shown to be seriously altered when physical cubic nonlinearity is taken into account in the modeling. This also affects an amplification of the wave due to the transverse instability of plane-localized waves and due to the plane-wave interaction.

Solitary Rayleigh waves in the presence of surface nonlinearities.

The propagation of Rayleigh waves is investigated in a solid substrate of linear material covered by a film consisting of a material with large nonlinear elastic moduli. For this system, a nonlinear evolution equation is derived that may be regarded as a special case in a wider class of evolution equations with a specific type of nonlocal nonlinearity. Periodic pulse train solutions are computed. For a certain member of the class of nonlinear evolution equations, several families of solitary wave solutions and their associated periodic stationary wave solutions are derived analytically.