Asymptotic Behaviour of Solutions of a Multidimensional Moving Boundary Problem Modeling Tumor Growth

We study a moving boundary problem modeling the growth of multicellular spheroids or in vitro tumors. This model consists of two elliptic equations describing the concentration of a nutrient and the distribution of the internal pressure in the tumor's body, respectively. The driving mechanism of the evolution of the tumor surface is governed by Darcy's law. Finally surface tension effects on the moving boundary are taken into account which are considered to counterbalance the internal pressure. To put our analysis on a solid basis, we first state a local well-posedness result for general initial data. However, the main purpose of our study is the investigation of the asymptotic behaviour of solutions as time goes to infinity. As a result of a centre manifold analysis, we prove that if the initial domain is sufficiently close to a Euclidean ball in the C m+μ-norm with m ≥ 3 and μ ∈ (0,1), then the solution exists globally and the corresponding domains converge exponentially fast to some (possibly shifted) ball, provided the surface tension coefficient γ is larger than a positive threshold value γ*. In the case 0 < γ < γ* the radially symmetric equilibrium is unstable.