#MathOnco Issue 66: ML vs mechanism; multi-stage models; population structure; spatial competition; perseverance & grit
This week in
Math Oncology
May 16, 2019 ~ Issue 66
From the editor
#MathOnco friends,
I really enjoyed meeting many of you at last week's CSBC-PSON Mathematical Oncology meeting at Oregon Health & Science University! It's great to see the math oncology community growing.
In other news, I stumbled across an article indicating the importance of grit & perseverance in science. Based on the success (or near-success) of junior scientists applying for NIH R01 grants, authors found that "despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperformed those with near wins in the longer run, as their publications in the next ten years garnered substantially higher impact." Read the article here. Don't let the setbacks get you down!
-Jeffrey West
#MathOnco Publications
Population structure determines the tradeoff between fixation probability and fixation time
Authors: Josef Tkadlec, Andreas Pavlogiannis, Krishnendu Chatterjee & Martin A. Nowak
Solid stress, competition for space and cancer: the opposing roles of mechanical cell competition in tumour initiation and growth
Authors: Romain Levayer
Measuring Clonal Evolution in Cancer with Genomics
Authors: Marc J. Williams, Andrea Sottoriva, and Trevor A. Graham
#MathOnco Preprints
Multi-stage models for the failure of complex systems, cascading disasters, and the onset of disease
Authors: Anthony J. Webster
Machine learning versus mechanistic modeling for prediction of metastatic relapse in breast cancer
Authors: C. Nicolò, C. Périer, M. Prague, G. MacGrogan, O. Saut, S. Benzekry
Quantifying cancer epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity and its association with stemness and immune response
Authors: Dongya Jia, Xuefei Li, Federico Bocci, Shubham Tripathi, Youyuan Deng, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Jose N. Onuchic, Herbert Levine
Good Cop - Bad Cop in Cancer Immunology
T. Hillen: The main role of our immune system is to find and eliminate invading pathogens, to kill infectious agents, and to heal the body if wounds occur. Without an immune response, we would not have survived as a species. The role of the immune response is often compared to the role of our police services in society. Police keep criminal elements at bay and allow societies to grow and flourish. However, this view might be too naive and ‘bad cops” might spoil this picture.
Is Communication the Key to Fighting Cancer?
L. Jones: Authors found that "as tumor cells begin to communicate, the growth of the overall tumor slows. This is because when cells interact, they synchronize and begin to occupy similar niches in the body. Coupled cells then compete for the same resources, so growth will slow compared to a more diverse population of cells that make use of differing conditions, resources, and reactions. Newton’s model relates the growth conditions of the tumor on a level of individual cells to its overall growth within the body."
#MathOnco - Book of the month
Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
Martin Nowak: This book, "draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves [and] presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos."
Most clicked links of April
Can we afford to ignore the role of space in cancer and pre-cancerous tissue any longer?
Prediction of Bone Metastasis in Inflammatory Breast Cancer Using a Markov Chain Model
Stochastic Evolution of Pancreatic Cancer Metastases During Logistic Clonal Expansion
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