A nonlocal equation describing tumor growth

Abstract: Cancer is a very complex phenomenon that involves many different scales and situations. In this paper we consider a free boundary problem describing the evolution of a tumor colony and we derive a new asymptotic model for tumor growth. We focus on the case of a single phase tumor colony taking into account chemotactic effects in an early stage where there is no necrotic inner region. Thus, our model is valid for the case of multilayer avascular tumors with very little access to both nutrients and inhibitors or the case where the amount of nutrients and inhibitors is very similar to the amount consumed by the multilayer tumor cells. Our model takes the form of a single nonlocal and nonlinear partial differential equation. Besides deriving the model, we also prove a well-posedness result.