Mechanical stress accumulating during growth in solid tumors plays a crucial role in the tumor mechanobiology. Stresses arise as a consequence of the spatially inhomogeneous tissue growth due to the different activity of healthy and cancer cells inhabiting the various districts of the tissue, an additional piling up effect, induced by stress transferring across the scales, contributing to determine the total stress occurring at the macroscopic level. The spatially inhomogeneous growth rates accompany nonuniform and time-propagating stress profiles, which constitute mechanical barriers to nutrient transport and influence the intratumoral interstitial flow, in this way deciding the starved/feeded regions, with direct aftereffects on necrosis, angiogenesis, cancer aggressiveness and overall tumor mass size. Despite their ascertained role in tumor mechanobiology, stresses cannot be directly appraised neither from overall tumor size nor through standard non-invasive measurements. To date, the sole way for qualitatively revealing their presence within solid tumors is ex vivo, by engraving the excised masses and then observing opening between the cut edges. Therefore, to contribute to unveil stresses and their implications in tumors, it is first proposed a multiscale model where Volterra-Lotka (predator/prey–like) equations describing the interspecific (environment-mediated) competitions among healthy and cancer cells are coupled with equations of nonlinear poroelasticity. Then, an experimental study on mice injected subcutaneously with a suspension of two different cancer cell lines (MiaPaCa-2 and MDA.MB231) was conducted to provide experimental evidences that gave qualitative and some new quantitative confirmations of the theoretical model predictions.

在实体瘤生长过程中积累的机械应力在肿瘤力学生物学中起着至关重要的作用。由于居住在组织各个区域的健康细胞和癌细胞的活性不同，空间上不均匀的组织生长会导致产生压力，应力在各个尺度上转移会引起额外的堆积效应，从而有助于确定发生的总应力在宏观层面上。空间上不均匀的增长率伴随着不均匀且时间传播的应力分布，它们构成了营养运输的机械障碍并影响了肿瘤内的间质流动，从而决定了饥饿/进食的区域，对坏死，血管生成，癌症侵袭性和总体有直接的后遗症肿瘤块大小。尽管已确定其在肿瘤力学生物学中的作用，但既不能从总体肿瘤大小也不能通过标准的非侵入性测量直接评估压力。迄今为止，定性揭示其在实体瘤中的存在的唯一方法是在体外，通过雕刻切除的肿块，然后观察切割边缘之间的开口。因此，为了有助于揭示压力及其在肿瘤中的影响，首先提出了一种多尺度模型，其中，描述健康细胞和癌细胞之间的种间竞争（环境介导）竞争的Volterra-Lotka（捕食者/猎物样）方程与方程相结合。非线性多孔弹性。然后，进行了对小鼠皮下注射两种不同癌细胞系（MiaPaCa-2和MDA.MB231）悬浮液的实验研究，以提供实验证据，为理论模型的预测提供了定性和一些新的定量确认。