Семинар "Научни изчисления и биоматематика"

организиран от секция “Математическо моделиране и числен анализ”

6 януари 2016 г., от 11:00 ч. в зала 503

Докладчик: Д-р Петър Рашков, Computational Biology Lab, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK

Заглавие на доклада: Emergence of drug resistance in cancer from the perspective of environmental competition

Резюме. A recent experimental study (Obenauf, et al., Nature, 2015) reports that therapy of mixed tumours consisting of both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cells leads to an accelerated proliferation of resistant clones compared to the control group. The authors propose that this ensues from a stress response of the drug-sensitive cells which release signalling macromolecules into the tumour microenvironment that support and stimulate the expansion of the drug-resistant cells. I propose a mathematical model based on environmental competition and nonlinear diffusion to demonstrate that accelerated growth and spread of the drug-resistant cells can occur independent of additional signalling. Travelling wave solutions of the model are studied analytically and numerically, and help bring insight how the drug-resistant cells expand significantly faster (relative to control) under therapy in a mixed tumour. The model raises attention to the importance of tumour spatial structure and organisation, which are often omitted from experimental and evolutionary models of cancer.