Pseudoprogression is a confounding treatment response pattern characterized by apparent disease progression followed by eventual treatment response. Patients who eventually experience clinical benefit may be incorrectly classified as progressors by RECIST criteria, leading to premature cessation of treatment. The exact mechanism of pseudoprogression is not fully understood and existing...
Recent advancements in high throughput RNA sequencing technologies have generated unprecedented amounts of high-dimensional genomic data, enabling more detailed analysis. Techniques from network science are widely used to analyze such data, but face significant challenges. One shortcoming of these methods is that many of them use thresholding. The lack of consensus regarding the method for...
Adaptive therapy is an evolution-based treatment paradigm in metastatic cancer, which dynamically adjusts treatment to control, rather than minimize, tumor burden. Promising clinical results in prostate cancer indicate the potential of adaptive treatment protocols to delay relapse, but demonstrate broad heterogeneity in patient response. This naturally leads to the question: why does this...
The words โresistanceโ and โrelapseโ are used interchangeably, and statements such as โtreatment resistance remains a critical limitation to the success of cancer therapyโ are flooding the introductions of research papers in (mathematical) oncology. Is this practice correct and appropriate? Does it matter in the clinic?
In this talk, I will contrast my preclinical research studies in...
The emergence of drug-tolerant cells in clonal cancer populations is the main cause of reduced cytotoxic drug efficacy. But these tolerant cells can also be used as a specific target to design drug combinations. In this study (\cite{peyre}), we investigate the response of clonal cancer cells to pro-apoptotic and pro-necroptotic drugs. In both cases, fractional killing increases upon repeated...
Systemic therapies have revolutionised our ability to treat metastatic cancer. However, improvements are all too often temporary due to compounding toxicity and the emergence of drug-resistance. Most drugs are given according to a one-size-fits all approach and only changed upon toxicity or progression. In this talk, I will present work across two different spatial-temporal scales in which we...
Metastatic disease is the leading cause of cancer-related death, despite recent advances in therapeutic interventions. Prior modeling approaches have accounted for the adaptive immune system's role in combating tumors, which has led to the development of stochastic models that explain cancer immunoediting and tumor-immune co-evolution. However, cancer immune-mediated dormancy, wherein the...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive primary brain tumor in adults, with a median survival between 14-21 months and no curative treatment currently available [1]. To investigate resistance mechanisms to temozolomide (TMZ), the standard-of-care chemotherapy, we generated perturbed proteomic data (with and without TMZ) for 12 patient-derived cell lines (PDCLs). Pathways enrichment and...
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...
