Abstract

Cancer growth and spread are complex processes involving nonlocal phenomena such as memory and interactions with the surrounding environment. Including these phenomena in the mathematical model results in partial differential equation (PDE) with nonlocal operators, which pose interesting challenges in demonstrating their well-posedness and in numerical simulation. In this work, we present and analyse a system of coupled partial differential equations, which models tumour growth under the influence of subdiffusion, mechanical effects, nutrient supply, and chemotherapy. The subdiffusion of the system is modelled by a time fractional derivative in the equation governing the volume fraction of the tumour cells. The mass densities of the nutrients and the chemotherapeutic agents are modelled by reaction diffusion equations. The existence and uniqueness of a weak solution to the model is obtained via the Faedo—Galerkin method and the application of appropriate compactness theorems. Lastly, we propose a fully discretised system and illustrate the effects of the fractional derivative and the influence of the fractional parameter in numerical examples.