Maximum therapeutic effect of glioma treatment by radio-frequency electric field

The influence of a radio-frequency electric field on glioma brain cancer development is considered. Specifically, the effectiveness of this medical technology against invasive cells with a high motility, when switching between migrating and proliferating phenotypes takes place, is addressed. It is shown that glioma development under the external field treatment can be modeled in the framework of the continuous time random walk, where the segregation of proliferating from not proliferating cells by the external electric field is naturally accounted for. The constructed reaction-transport equation is based on the fact that cytokinesis affects the cell dynamics strongly, and the cell kinetics is non-Markovian, which is reflected in both the transport and reaction properties of cells. As a result of the interplay between cell proliferation and cell degradation, migrating cancer cells spread freely without being influenced by the details of the degradation of the proliferating cells, which leads to a decrease in the effectiveness of the treatment.