Stability analysis of mathematical models for nonlinear growth kinetics of breast cancer stem cells

Cancer stem cells are responsible for tumor survival and resurgence and are thus essential in developing novel therapeutic strategies against cancer. Mathematical models can help understand cancer stem and differentiated cell interaction in tumor growth, thus having the potential to help in designing experiments to develop novel therapeutic strategies against cancer. In this paper, by using theory of functional and ordinary differential equations, we study the existence and stability of nonlinear growth kinetics of breast cancer stem cells. First, we provide a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of the solution for nonlinear growth kinetics of breast cancer stem cells. Then we study the uniform asymptotic stability of the zero solution. By using linearization techniques, we also provide a criteria for uniform asymptotic stability of a nontrivial steady‐state solution with and without time delays. We present a theorem from complex analysis that gives certain conditions that allow for this criteria to be satisfied. Next, we apply these theorems to a special case of the system of functional differential equations that has been used to model nonlinear growth kinetics of breast cancer stem cells. The theoretical results are further justified by numerical testing examples. Consistent with the theories, our numerical examples show that the time delays can disrupt the stability. All the results can be easily extended to study more general cell lineage models. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.