This week in MathOnco 286

Non-genetic resistance, clonal selection, spatial heterogeneity, and more.

“This week in Mathematical Oncology” — February 29, 2024

> mathematical-oncology.org

From the editor:

This week’s edition includes topics like non-genetic resistance, clonal selection, spatial heterogeneity, and more.

This week’s artwork is from one of our own papers. I hope you enjoy the visualization!

There are several job postings added: an Assistant Professorship, and PhD studentships, at the bottom of this email.

Enjoy,

Jeffrey West
jeffrey.west@moffitt.org

1. Clonal selection parallels between normal and cancer tissues
   Adrian Salavaty, Esmaeel Azadian, Shalin H. Naik, Peter D. Currie

2. The impact of age and number of mutations on the size of clonal hematopoiesis
   Kai Wang, Wen Zhang, Li Yi, …Wei-Ping Yang, Hai Fang, Zhu Chen, Wang-Wei Cai, Rui-Bao Ren

3. Mitigating non-genetic resistance to checkpoint inhibition based on multiple states of immune exhaustion
   Irina Kareva & Jana L. Gevertz

4. Clonal differences underlie variable responses to sequential and prolonged treatment
   Dylan L. Schaff, Aria J. Fasse, Phoebe E. White, Robert J. Vander Velde, Sydney M. Shaffer

5. Diverse mutant selection windows shape spatial heterogeneity in evolving populations
   Eshan S. King, Dagim S. Tadele, Beck Pierce, Michael Hinczewski, Jacob G. Scott

1. Microenvironment Shapes Cell State, Plasticity, and Heterogeneity of Small Cell Lung Cancer
   Parth Desai, Nobuyuki Takahashi, Rajesh Kumar, Samantha Nichols, …, G Tom Brown, Stephen Hewitt, Thomas Conrads, Anish Thomas

2. Epigenome and early selection determine the tumour-immune evolutionary trajectory of colorectal cancer
   Eszter Lakatos, Vinaya Gunasri, Luis Zapata, Jacob Househam, …, John Bridgewater, Ann-Marie Baker, Andrea Sottoriva, Trevor A. Graham

1. The Siren Song of Synergy
   Blood Cancer Discovery: Patrick D. Bhola, Anthony Letai

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: Tumor-immune metaphenotypes orchestrate an evolutionary bottleneck that promotes metabolic transformation, published in Frontiers in Immunology.

Artist: Jeffrey West, Mark Robertson-Tessi, Sandy Anderson

Caption: The original concept of metaphenotype was defined in 2017 after observing simulations with similar initial conditions but vastly different outcomes, due to spatial location of phenotypes in context leading to collective actions. The artwork depicts the difficulty in predicting outcomes based on initial condition alone (hence, the jumbled lines). In this recent work, we define metaphenotypes in the context of tumor-immune interactions. A more formal definition of Metaphenotype: A collective phenotype that integrates multiple phenotypes within a specific context. Explicitly accounts for interactions between distinct phenotypes & contexts that together drive specific behaviors eg acid invasion or immune evasion. See tweet thread on the paper, here.

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

• Assistant Professor of Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Birmingham (Fabian Spill)

• PhD student in Machine Learning with a focus on scientific computing for applications in cancer research. Apply by: March 28, 2024. (Uppsala University, Sara Hamis)

• Position 2: PhD student in interdisciplinary mathematics with a focus on bio-medical modelling. Apply by: March 22, 2024. (Uppsala University, Sara Hamis)

2. Conferences / Meetings

3. Special issues

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