Analysis of a tumor growth model with a nonlocal boundary condition

Abstract: In this paper, we conduct a thorough mathematical analysis of a tumor growth model with treatments. The model is a system describing the evolution of metastatic tumors and the number of cells present in a primary tumor. The former evolution is described by a linear transport equation and the latter by an ordinary differential equation of Gompertzian type. The two dynamics are coupled through a nonlocal boundary condition that takes into account the tumor colonization rate. We prove an existence result where the main difficulty is to deal with the coupling and to take into account the time discontinuities generated by treatment terms. We also present numerical tests that highlight the effect of different treatments.