Modeling glioblastoma response to radiotherapy by combining a two-compartment kinetic model and multiparametric NMR data

Glioblastoma are the most common and malignant primary brain tumor, and actual treatments consist of surgery (when possible), radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Recent discoveries in biology revealed the important role of radioresistant cancer stem cell in the tumor proliferation and also showed that differentiated tumor cells can revert to a stem-like state because of radiation. These discoveries can be used to create mathematical models to study and plan new optimized radiotherapy schedules. In literature, some models have already been developed on murine population. The aim of this study was to reproduce these models, to perform a sensitivity analysis to find the most sensitive parameters and to adapt them to standard schedules used with human patients. We found that the most sensitive parameters are those involving tumor cell proliferation, radio-sensibility and quiescence times of both stem and tumor cells.