Quiescent cells: A natural way to resist chemotherapy

摘要: Abstract Most chemotherapeutic treatments use drugs that target proliferating cancer cells. Therefore, they do not affect quiescent cells which are naturally resistant. Surviving can reactivate their cell cycles in the intervals between doses, becoming proliferative again and thus restarting tumor growth. In this work, we present a mathematical model to study impact of on chemotherapy effectiveness. Our simulations show that, although growth is delayed after beginning each dose, resistance enough it due accelerated repopulation, eventually causing therapy failure even absence acquired resistance.