This week in MathOnco 243

Antifragility, model identifiability, oncolytic virus, EMT, paracrine interactions, and more.

“This week in Mathematical Oncology” — Feb. 16, 2023

> mathematical-oncology.org

From the editor:

Today we feature articles on antifragility, model identifiability, oncolytic virus, EMT, paracrine interactions, and more.

Enjoy,

Jeffrey West
jeffrey.west@moffitt.org

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“The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.”
— A. Einstein¹

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1. Working with Convex Responses: Antifragility from Finance to Oncology
   Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jeffrey West

2. Cell State-Directed Therapy – Epigenetic Modulation of Gene Transcription Demonstrated with A Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Model of Temozolomide
   Anshul Saini, James M. Gallo

3. Bow-tie architectures in biological and artificial neural networks: Implications for network evolution and assay design
   Seth Hilliard, Karen Mosoyan, Sergio Branciamore, Grigoriy Gogoshin, Alvin Zhang, Diana L. Simons, Russell C. Rockne, Peter P. Lee, Andrei S. Rodin

4. Practical Understanding of Cancer Model Identifiability in Clinical Applications
   Tin Phan, Justin Bennett, Taylor Patten

5. Emulating Randomized Controlled Trials with Hybrid Control Arms in Oncology: A Case Study
   Sanhita Sengupta, Ives Ntambwe, Katherine Tan, Qixing Liang, David Paulucci, Emily Castellanos, Joseph Fiore, Stephen Lane, Mariann Micsinai Balan, Kalyanee Viraswami-Apanna, Venkat Sethuraman, Meghna Samant, Ram Tiwari

6. Oncolytic viral kinetics mechanistic modeling of Talimogene Laherparepvec (T-VEC) a first-in-class oncolytic viral therapy in patients with advanced melanoma
   Malidi Ahamadi, Johannes Kast, Po-Wei Chen, Xiaojun Huang, Sandeep Dutta, Vijay V. Upreti

7. Emergent dynamics of underlying regulatory network links EMT and androgen receptor-dependent resistance in prostate cancer
   Rashi Jindal, Abheepsa Nanda, Maalavika Pillai, Kathryn E Ware, Divyoj Singh, Manas Sehgal, Andrew J. Armstrong, Jason A Somarelli, Mohit Kumar Jolly

1. Paracrine enhancement of tumor cell proliferation provides indirect stroma-mediated chemoresistance via acceleration of tumor recovery between chemotherapy cycles
   Daria Miroshnychenko, Tatiana Miti, Anna K. Miller, Pragya Kumar, Mark Laurie, Marilyn M Bui, Philipp M Altrock, David Basanta, Andriy Marusyk

2. Individual costs and societal benefits of interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic
   Arne Traulsen, Simon A. Levin, Chadi M. Saad-Roy

1. Minisymposium at Society of Molecular Biology & Evolution:
   ”23 - Evolutionary approaches to understand cancer across scales"
   Organizers: Alison Feder, Robert Noble
   Invited speakers: Ivana Bozic, Alexander Cagan
   Description of the symposium: “Somatic mutation and subsequent evolution are unavoidable outcomes of exogenous and endogenous processes affecting the cells of multicellular organisms, which only rarely give rise to cancer. Key to disentangling why cancer risk varies among species, tissues and tumors is a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving mutational accumulation, and the evolutionary forces that permit those mutations to change in frequency. Increased genomic data collection and methodological advances now permit us to examine these processes with unprecedented resolution. In this symposium, we will bring together researchers quantitatively examining somatic evolution across multiple scales: What are the processes driving somatic evolution across organisms and how does this contribute to cancer risk? What properties make some tissues or cell lineages vulnerable to cancer while others remain robust? Why does somatic evolution drive only some tumors towards malignancy and metastasis? We invite submissions that build new frameworks to analyze genomic data derived from cancerous or healthy tissues, exploit emerging data types (including single cell and/or spatial RNA-sequencing, epigenomes, in-situ hybridization and multi-region sequencing) from an explicitly evolutionary lens, or offer theoretical advances in the understanding of tumor risk and progression. By considering these shared processes across scales with approaches deriving from genomics, mathematical modeling and evolutionary theory, we hope to reach a deeper understanding of how and why tumors emerge and ultimately cause disease.”

The newsletter now has a dedicated homepage where we post the cover artwork for each issue. We encourage submissions that coincide with the release of a recent paper from your group. This week’s artwork:

Based on the paper: “Working with Convex Responses: Antifragility from Finance to Oncology” in Entropy

Artist: Jeffrey West

Caption: "The opposite of the word ‘fragile’ can be defined as `antifragile’ — wherein systems derive a benefit from volatile perturbations. The concept of antifragility has been extensively explored in financial applications as a method of hedging risk of market volatility. These same techniques and principles can be applied to cancer treatment, where volatility due to treatment can be controlled and manipulated by a cancer physician to induce extinction or improve response. The mathematical framework is based on the curvature of dose response functions (concave or convex). The artwork shows some example dose response curves, ranging from high (blue) to low (red) concavity."

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1. H/T Ilir Sheraj (@sheraj_ilir) - thanks for the quote!