This week in MathOnco 315

Hypoxia, spatial modeling, immune suppression, and more...

“This week in Mathematical Oncology” — Dec 5, 2024

> mathematical-oncology.org

From the editor:

Hello! We’re back in action this week with topics like hypoxia, spatial modeling, immune suppression, and more...

Don’t miss new blog post from Moffitt postdoc Sadegh Marzban on Lenia, a new method for spatial models of cancer.

There are a bunch of job posts, below, too.

Thanks,

Jeffrey West
jeffrey.west@moffitt.org

1. Characterising Cancer Cell Responses to Cyclic Hypoxia Using Mathematical Modelling
   Giulia L. Celora, Ruby Nixson, Joe M. Pitt-Francis, Philip K. Maini, Helen M. Byrne

2. Personalised in silico biomechanical modelling towards the optimisation of high dose-rate brachytherapy planning and treatment against prostate cancer
   Myrianthi Hadjicharalambous, Yiannis Roussakis, George Bourantas, Eleftherios Ioannou, Karol Miller, Paul Doolan, Iosif Strouthos, Constantinos Zamboglou, Vasileios Vavourakis

3. Combining Biology-based and MRI Data-driven Modeling to Predict Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Patients with Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
   Casey E. Stowers, Chengyue Wu, Zhan Xu, Sidharth Kumar, Clinton Yam, Jong Bum Son, Jingfei Ma, Jonathan I. Tamir, Gaiane M. Rauch, Thomas E. Yankeelov

4. Understanding tumour growth variability in breast cancer xenograft models identifies PARP inhibition resistance biomarkers
   D. Voulgarelis, J. V. Forment, A. Herencia Ropero, D. Polychronopoulos, J. Cohen-Setton, A. Bender, V. Serra, M. J. O’Connor, J. W. T. Yates & K. C. Bulusu

5. A mathematical model to study the role of dystrophin protein in tumor micro-environment
   Ausif Padder, Tafaz Ul Rahman Shah, Afroz Afroz, Aadil Mushtaq & Anita Tomar

6. Experimentally-driven mathematical model to understand the effects of matrix deprivation in breast cancer metastasis
   Sayoni Maiti, Annapoorni Rangarajan & Venkatesh Kareenhalli

7. Dual attention model with reinforcement learning for classification of histology whole-slide images
   Manahil Raza, Ruqayya Awan, Raja Muhammad Saad Bashir, Talha Qaiser, Nasir M. Rajpoot

8. Modeling Drug Responses and Evolutionary Dynamics using Patient-Derived Xenografts Reveals Precision Medicine Strategies for Triple Negative Breast Cancer
   Abigail Shea, Yaniv Eyal-Lubling, Daniel Guerrero-Romero, Raquel Manzano Garcia, … Carlos Caldas, Jean Abraham, Oscar M. Rueda, Alejandra Bruna

1. How Modulation of the Tumor Microenvironment Drives Cancer Immune Escape Dynamics
   Pujan Shrestha, Zahra S. Ghoreyshi, Jason T. George

2. Integrated multiomics analysis unveils how macrophages drive immune suppression in breast tumors and affect clinical outcomes
   Youness Azimzade, Mads Haugland Haugen, Vessela Nedelcheva Kristensen, Arnoldo Frigessi, Alvaro Köhn-Luque

1. Lenia: Bridging Artificial Life and Cancer Biology
   The Mathematical Oncology Blog
   Sadegh Marzban: “How cool is the name 'Artificial Life'? It literally means bringing life to a computer, letting you test your craziest ideas without any of the real-world side effects! We used one such system, Lenia, to explore tumor growth and study interactions within the tumor-immune environment. Lenia (from the Latin lenis, meaning “smooth”) is a cellular automata framework that operates with continuous space and time, inspired by Lenia Mathematical Lifeforms—a continuous generalization of John Conway’s Game of Life.“

2. INTERPHACE symposium 2025
   24 February 2025 at The Francis Crick Institute
   ”We are hosting a symposium at the INTERPHACE of experimental and theoretical/computational life sciences. All presenters will reflect the power of interdisciplinary collaboration in driving progress in life sciences. We have a great line up of confirmed speakers who have all faced the challenge of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Talks will focus on how a combined experimental and computational/theoretical approach can answer a research question, which previously would not have been possible from a single discipline approach.”

3. Renee Brady

   Math Oncology Interviews by Thomas Hillen (YouTube)

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: Altered thymic niche synergistically drives the massive proliferation of malignant thymocytes in eLife

Artist: Erika Tsingos (Twitter: @tisrenk, BlueSky: tisrenk.bsky.social), Utrecht University

Caption: In an agent-based simulation of thymus homeostasis, we track entry of early T cell progenitors, their clonal expansion, and eventual exit from the organ. In each simulation, we also include a single T cell progenitor that bears a mutation. The picture visualizes the coming and going of cells in a simulation, where each color shade indicates a clonal lineage. The black color indicates the mutated clone, which has a slightly shorter cell cycle time but otherwise behaves normally. The height of each colored patch indicates the number of cells in that clone, the length indicates simulation time.  For this artistic rendition, the color scheme was chosen to be evocative of a hilly landscape reflected in a still lake.

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

• Postdoc Fellow - Radiation Oncology- Research (Dr. Butner's Lab; MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA)

• Assistant Professor in Computational Modeling for Health (Delft University)

• Computer Science - Assistant Professor Position in AI for Science, UCLA

• Computer Science - Assistant Professor, UCLA

• Faculty Position - Department of Computational Medicine, UCLA

2. Conferences / Meetings

3. Special issues

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