Copyright © 2002 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper deals with the modeling of the immune response to the evolution of the progression of endothelial cells which have lost the differentiation and start their evolution towards metastatic states. The modeling is developed in the framework of the so-called kinetic cellular theory. The model is critically analyzed on the basis of analytic solutions, asymptotic behaviors and numerical simulations that illustrate the scenarios predicted by the model. Finally, possible developments and generalizations that could describe other known phenomena are pointed out.