ALT Talk date: 01 March 2024 Speaker: Fiona Macfarlane Institution: St Andrews Talk title: Discrete and continuum methods to describe cancer invasion processes Abstract: The ability of biological cell populations to correlate their movement and proliferation processes can result in collective migration and evolving spatio-temporal patterns at the cellular population level. These collective mechanisms play an important role in the formation and growth of solid tumours. We have formulated agent-based models of cancer invasion wherein the infiltrating cancer cells may occupy a spectrum of states in phenotype space, for example ranging from `fully mesenchymal' to `fully epithelial'. The more mesenchymal cells are those that display more migratory phenotypes, where we examine directed cell movement such as haptotaxis or pressure-dependent movement. However, as a trade-off, they have lower proliferative capacity than the more epithelial cells.