jeffreywest/prisoners_dilemma_cancer_model

A cancer model based in the Prisoner's Dilemma evolutionary dynamics game, originally published in SIAM Review

Prisoner's Dilemma as a cancer model

Author: Jeffrey West, Date: 2 - 29 - 2016

Publications

This code or code developed on top of this framework has been used in the following publications:

The Prisoner's Dilemma as a cancer model

An evolutionary model of tumor cell kinetics and the emergence of molecular heterogeneity driving Gompertzian growth

How to use:

This code is written for use in MatLab, main.m is the executable file and buildA.m, buildQ.m, checkMutation.m, chooseBirthType.m, chooseDeathType.m are functions used by the main.m executable.

Parameters

The code runs an evolutionary dynamics simulation, which is a constant population process (N = # of cells competing = constant). The selection pressure, w, varies between 0 (no selection, equivalent to the Moran Process) and 1 (full selection pressure: maximum effect of the Prisoner's Dilemma).

This simple model encompasses two phenotypes (healthy, cancer) which consist of 2^b genetic types in total, where b is the bit length of the 'numerical genome' of each cell. For example, for b = 4, there are 16 genetic types which are course-grained into 11 healthy and 5 cancer types.

This code runs a single stochastic simulation and plots the result.