This Week in Mathematical Oncology
This week in
Mathematical Oncology
January 4, 2018 ~ Issue 3
From the editor
Happy new year! The close of 2017 and the dawn of 2018 saw a flurry of activity: blogs, preprints, and more. It also provided an opportunity for a pause to reflect on the accomplishments of the mathematical oncology community. How far we've come!
Today's issue includes a few blogs detailing the unseen forethought, hills, and valleys of scientific endeavor. Never miss the opportunity to explain the nuances or the humble beginnings of collaborations -- even one that began with a scribble on a napkin!
I'd also like to personally welcome new subscribers. View our past editions here and .
-Jeffrey West
#MathOnco Publications
Cancer as a disorder of patterning information: computational and biophysical perspectives on the cancer problem
Authors: Douglas Moore, Sara I Walker, Michael Levin
A Brownian dynamics tumor progression simulator with application to glioblastoma
Authors: Rebecca L Klank, Steven S Rosenfeld, David J Odde
#MathOnco Preprints
The network structure of cancer ecosystems
Authors: Simon P P Castillo, Rolando Rebolledo, ..., Pablo A Marquet
Pan-cancer characterisation of microRNA with hallmarks of cancer reveals role of micro-RNA-mediated downregulation of tumour suppressor genes
Authors: Andrew Dhawan, Jacob G Scott, Adrian L Harris, Francesca M Buffa
A minimal "push-pull" bistability model explains oscillations between quiescent and proliferative cell states
Authors: Sandeep Krishma, Sunil Laxman
The null additivity of multi-drug combinations
Authors: Don Russ, Roy Kishony
#MathOnco blogs
A tale of two papers and two new friends
"We kept chewing on the problem, and I went to visit Cornell and took a long walk with Bertrand and Steven and Murray (the Strogatz family dog) and even more lightbulbs went off concerning a quite technical, but important detail of the models of evolutionary dynamics - in particular, the choice of the order of update (Birth or Death first) and how fitness biases are implemented (whether you choose which node to replace based on fitness, or how probable it is for a given node to divide)."
Suppressing resistance to cancer therapy
"What can a Darwinian perspective offer cancer research? For starters, evolutionary arguments can explain why cancer exists at all, and why cancer risk doesn’t simply correlate with organismal body size and lifespan, nor with the number of cell divisions in a tissue. Patterns of tumour progression and diversification can be understood – potentially even predicted."
Size matters: metastatic cluster size and stromal recruitment in the establishment of successful prostate cancer to bone metastasis
"While seeding a handful of prostate cancer cells in the bone is better than seeding one, the rule the more the merrier is not always true. Beyond a threshold the more cells the more competition for the limited resources that need to be shared not only between the tumor cells but also between the stromal cells that are co-opted by the metastasis to support the growth."
#MathOnco Books
The Gene: An Intimate History
Siddhartha Mukherjee makes another appearance, this time via his beautiful work on the history of genetics. A story of an idea before evidence, the surprising history of finding the "unit" of evolution is fascinating at every turn of the page.
Do you see something we missed? Click the submit button below to send us an idea for next week's issue.
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