Understanding the antiangiogenic effect of metronomic chemotherapy through a simple mathematical model

• A mean field model for antiangiogenic chemotherapy is proposed.
• Metronomic and maximum-tolerated schedules are compared by numerical simulations.
• Metronomic schedules are found to be more effective in eliminating tumour cells.

Despite the current and increasingly successful fight against cancer, there are some important questions concerning the efficiency of its treatment — in particular, the design of oncology chemotherapy protocols. Seeking efficiency, schedules based on more frequent, low-doses of drugs, known as metronomic chemotherapy, have been proposed as an alternative to the classical standard protocol of chemotherapy administration. The in silico approach may be very useful for providing a comparative analysis of these two kinds of protocols. In so doing, we found that metronomic schedules are more effective in eliminating tumour cells mainly due to their chemotherapeutic action on endothelial cells and that more frequent, low drug doses also entail outcomes in which the survival time of patient is increased.