Emergent ecological regimes from competition between tumor and anti-tumor teams

It is now recognized that tumors do not exist in isolation but instead create an ecosystem of their own, the tumor microenvironment (TME), which plays a crucial role in either promoting or inhibiting tumor growth. The TME comprises diverse cell types that interact both with the tumor and with each other. Notably, the various cell types in the TME cluster into two broad communities: a pro-tumor community and an anti-tumor community. These communities behave like two competing teams, with cooperative within each team and competitive interactions across teams. The heterogeneity in the tumor microenvironment makes it difficult to model quantitatively and the dynamical regimes of such an ecosystem remain unknown. To overcome this problem, we use random generalized Lotka-Volterra equations and the cavity method to derive exactly and characterize the various regimes which lead to coexistence and exclusion governed by the intra-team cooperation and and inter-team inhibition under varying heterogeneity in a random ecosystem having pro-tumor team and the anti-tumor team that inhibit each other. Our results provide a statistical mechanical foundation for understanding the collective tumor-immune dynamics from ecological interactions.