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Resource Consumption, Sustainability, and Cancer

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Abstract

Preserving a system’s viability in the presence of diversity erosion is critical if the goal is to sustainably support biodiversity. Reduction in population heterogeneity, whether inter- or intraspecies, may increase population fragility, either decreasing its ability to adapt effectively to environmental changes or facilitating the survival and success of ordinarily rare phenotypes. The latter may result in over-representation of individuals who may participate in resource utilization patterns that can lead to over-exploitation, exhaustion, and, ultimately, collapse of both the resource and the population that depends on it. Here, we aim to identify regimes that can signal whether a consumer–resource system is capable of supporting viable degrees of heterogeneity. The framework used here is an expansion of a previously introduced consumer–resource type system of a population of individuals classified by their resource consumption. Application of the Reduction Theorem to the system enables us to evaluate the health of the system through tracking both the mean value of the parameter of resource (over)consumption, and the population variance, as both change over time. The article concludes with a discussion that highlights applicability of the proposed system to investigation of systems that are affected by particularly devastating overly adapted populations, namely cancerous cells. Potential intervention approaches for system management are discussed in the context of cancer therapies.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by Grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF-Grant DMPS-0838705), the National Security Agency (NSA-Grant H98230-09-1-0104), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Office of the Provost of Arizona State University and Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NCBI. This publication was made possible in part by Grant No. 1R01GM100471-01 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIGMS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematical, Computational Modeling Sciences Center, Arizona State University, PO Box 871904, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Irina Kareva, Benjamin Morin & Carlos Castillo-Chavez

  2. Newman-Lakka Institute for Personalized Cancer Care, Floating Hospital for Children, Tufts Medical Center, 75 Kneeland St., Boston, MA, 02111, USA

    Irina Kareva

  3. Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Benjamin Morin

  4. School of Human Evolution and Social Changes, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Carlos Castillo-Chavez

Authors
  1. Irina Kareva
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  2. Benjamin Morin
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  3. Carlos Castillo-Chavez
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Correspondence to Irina Kareva.

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Kareva, I., Morin, B. & Castillo-Chavez, C. Resource Consumption, Sustainability, and Cancer. Bull Math Biol 77, 319–338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-014-9983-1

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