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Created by: Eric Cramer, Laura Heiser, Young Hwan Chang
Issue 374: The tumor microenvironment is an ecosystem whose state evolves over time, and that evolution traces a path across a landscape of possibilities. This map renders one such trajectory landscape: each colored basin is a metastable configuration our agent-based simulations settle into. The streamlines trace how the multicellular system as a whole meanders amongst them – doubling back on itself, changing direction, and eventually making its way towards immune control, exhaustion, or unchecked tumor growth. The compass rose marks key orientations – Initiation, Control, Exhaustion, and Escape – that the system can resolve toward. In our recent arXiv preprint (arXiv:2603.18333), this landscape becomes the substrate for state-aware therapy design via a switched Markov State Model, assessing where a tumor is and where it is poised to go next. A companion bioRxiv preprint (doi:10.64898/2026.03.26.714521) projects real multiplex tumor images from clinical trials onto the same landscape, linking spatial phenotypes to patient survival. Adobe Firefly was used to generate the stylized map, with refining and editing in Inkscape.
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