ArticleNature physics2020
Universal scaling laws rule explosive growth in human cancers.
Article in Nature physics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Tumor Growth, Proliferation and Diffusion in Osteosarcoma.Acta biotheoretica · 2025Article
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- Image segmentation of treated and untreated tumor spheroids by fully convolutional networks.GigaScience · 2025Article
- Spatial interactions modulate tumor growth and immune infiltration.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Growth dynamics of lung nodules: implications for classification in lung cancer screening.Cancer imaging : the official publication of the International Cancer Imaging Society · 2024Article
- Spatial interactions modulate tumor growth and immune infiltration.Research square · 2024Article
- Growth speed of large brain metastases between diagnostic and radiosurgical planning MRI and predictors of rapid tumor growth.Japanese journal of radiology · 2024Article
- Spatial interactions modulate tumor growth and immune infiltration.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Computational markers for personalized prediction of outcomes in non-small cell lung cancer patients with brain metastases.Clinical & experimental metastasis · 2024Article
- Radiation necrosis after radiation therapy treatment of brain metastases: A computational approach.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
27 authors at 11 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a measure of the size of the system. Here we describe the discovery of universal superlinear metabolic scaling laws in human cancers. This dependence underpins increasing tumour aggressiveness, due to evolutionary dynamics, which leads to an explosive growth as the disease progresses. We validated this dynamic using longitudinal volumetric data of different histologies from large cohorts of cancer patients. To explain our observations we put forward increasingly-complex biologically-inspired mathematical models that captured the key processes governing tumor growth. Our models predicted that the emergence of superlinear allometric scaling laws is an inherently three-dimensional phenomenon. Moreover, the scaling laws thereby identified allowed us to define a set of metabolic metrics with prognostic value, thus providing added clinical utility to the base findings.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.