Targeting the quiescent cells in cancer chemotherapy treatment: Is it enough?

In this work, we develop a mathematical model to study the effect of drug on the development of cancer including the quiescent compartment. The model is governed by a system of delay differential equations where the delay represents the time that the cancer cell take to proliferate. Our analytical study of the stability shows that by considering the time delay as a parameter of bifurcation, it is possible to have stability switch and oscillations through a Hopf bifurcation. Moreover, by introducing the drug intervention term, the critical delay value increases. This indicates that the system can tolerate a longer delay before oscillations start. In the end, we present some numerical simulations illustrating our theoretical results.