Speakers
Description
Cancer development and therapeutic resistance emerge from adaptive mechanisms acting across multiple biological scales, ranging from intracellular regulatory and metabolic processes to interactions among heterogeneous tumor cell populations and population-level system dynamics involving the immune system and the tumor microenvironment.
This minisymposium brings together early-career researchers (PhD students and postdoctoral fellows) who combine mechanistic modeling with quantitative experimental and pre-clinical data to investigate cancer progression and therapy response. Contributions are organized into two sessions addressing complementary biological scales: (1) intracellular and cellular mechanisms, and (2) population-level and microenvironmental dynamics. At the cell-intrinsic level, models characterize regulatory, metabolic, and gene-network processes shaping cellular response. At the intercellular level, interactions among tumor subpopulations and phenotypic plasticity are explored as key drivers of resistance. At the population level, models incorporate immune dynamics and tumor microenvironment modulation to study therapy-induced resistance, immune escape, and treatment scheduling. By showcasing data-driven, multi-scale modeling approaches explicitly confronted with experiments, this minisymposium aims to foster dialogue between theory and experiments and to promote integrative quantitative perspectives on cancer dynamics and therapeutic strategies.
