This week in MathOnco 256

Evolutionary traps, acquired resistance, clinical trial design, and more

“This week in Mathematical Oncology” — June 1, 2023

> mathematical-oncology.org

From the editor:

Today’s newsletter contains articles on evolutionary traps, acquired resistance, clinical trial design, and more.

The quote below is contained in Philip Ball’s excellent review of the recently published “Song of the Cell” — I encourage you to give both the review & the book a read.

Thanks,

Jeffrey West
jeffrey.west@moffitt.org

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“Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars.”
―David Waldron Smithers

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1. Biomarkers or Biotargets? Using Competition to Lure Cancer Cells into Evolutionary Traps
   Anuraag Bukkuri, Frederick R Adler

2. Modeling the effect of acquired resistance on cancer therapy outcomes
   M.A. Masud, Jae-Young Kim, Eunjung Kim

3. Clinical trial designs for evaluating and exploiting cancer evolution
   Alvaro H Ingles Garces, Nuria Porta, Trevor A Graham, Udai Banerji

4. Cancers adapt to their mutational load by buffering protein misfolding stress
   Susanne Tilk, Judith Frydman, Christina Curtis, Dmitri Petrov

5. Unraveling the Drivers of Tumorigenesis in the Context of Evolution: Theoretical Models and Bioinformatics Tools
   Xunuo Zhu, Wenyi Zhao, Zhan Zhou & Xun Gu

1. Continuum and discrete models of oncolytic virotherapy in different tumour microenvironments
   David Morselli, Marcello Edoardo Delitala, Federico Frascoli

2. A mathematical framework for the emergence of winners and losers in cell competition
   Thomas F. Pak, Joe M. Pitt-Francis, Ruth E. Baker

1. A call for an integrated biology
   Philip Ball: “Nobel laureate biologist Paul Nurse described cells as “the basic unit of life”: biology's atom, the smallest entity that is uncontroversially alive. As oncologist and bestselling author Siddhartha Mukherjee explains in The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, a great deal of medicine comes down to a quest to understand how human cells function and malfunction, individually and collectively in tissues, organs, and bodies.“

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: Quantifying the Morphology and Mechanisms of Cancer Progression in 3D In-Vitro Environments: Integrating Experiments and Multiscale Models (IEEE TBME) & Cancer cell sedimentation in 3D cultures reveals active migration regulated by self-generated gradients and adhesion sites (Biorxiv).

Artist: Nikolaos Dimitriou (@NikosDim3)

Caption: "Studying cancer growth in a 3D in-vitro setting provides more realistic conditions than 2D culture growth, as well as increased flexibility of data collection than in-vivo conditions. However, the increased dimensionality makes mathematical modelling more challenging, especially when the model describes a variety of cell states and dynamics. This artwork represents the dual representation of cancer cells in a 3D culture, the continuum and the discrete. Using these two representations in our recent work, we developed an efficient calibration and validation framework for hybrid (discrete-continuum) models of cancer growth."

Visit the mathematical oncology page to view jobs, meetings, and special issues. We will post new additions here, but the full list can found at mathematical-oncology.org.

1. Jobs

2. Conferences / Meetings

• Advances in Computational Biology (NGSchool2023), Warsaw, Poland 🇵🇱, (Zuzanna Nowicka, Medical University of Lodz, Poland)

3. Special issues

• Mathematical modeling in radiotherapy and immunotherapy; Journal: Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering (Editors: David A. Hormuth, II, Guillermo Lorenzo, Joseph D. Butner, Chengyue Wu, Mohammad U. Zahid; Deadline: March 31 2024)

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