Abstract:
We consider a spatial model of cancer in which cells are points on the d-dimensional torus
$\mathcal{T}=[0,L]^d$
, and each cell with
$k-1$
mutations acquires a kth mutation at rate
$\mu_k$
. We assume that the mutation rates
$\mu_k$
are increasing, and we find the asymptotic waiting time for the first cell to acquire k mutations as the torus volume tends to infinity. This paper generalizes results on waiting for
$k\geq 3$
mutations in Foo et al. (2020), which considered the case in which all of the mutation rates
$\mu_k$
are the same. In addition, we find the limiting distribution of the spatial distances between mutations for certain values of the mutation rates.