European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB 2026)

Incorporating Toxicity Constraints in Adaptive Cancer Therapy

MS75-04

16 Jul 2026, 11:40

20m

62.01 - HS (University of Graz)

Minisymposium Talk Mathematical Oncology From dose to response: advances in modelling treatment efficacy and toxicity in tumor forecasts

Speaker

Kathleen Wilkie (Toronto Metropolitan University)

Description

Adaptive cancer therapy is a new paradigm of treatment for non-curative disease that aims to prolong emergence of resistance, and thus treatment failure. Here we use a mathematical model to explore how incorporating treatment toxicity into the protocol of adaptive therapy can be beneficial by both extending time to treatment failure and improving the quality of life for the patient \cite{gevertz2026delaying}. Our mathematical framework implements treatment-pausing adaptive therapy with a tumour comprised of sensitive and resistant cancer cells. We show that the degree of competition between these populations critically modulates the impact of toxicity feedback, and treatment breaks. We explore circumstances where these breaks provide benefit both at our baseline parameterization and across heterogeneous virtual populations.

Bibliography

@article{gevertz2026delaying,
title={Delaying cancer progression by integrating toxicity constraints in a model of adaptive therapy},
author={Gevertz, Jana L and Jain, Harsh Vardhan and Kareva, Irina and Wilkie, Kathleen P and Brown, Joel and Huang, Yitong Pepper and Sontag, Eduardo and Vinogradov, Vladimir and Davies, Mark},
journal={npj Systems Biology and Applications},
year={2026},
publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}