Seminar "Scientific Computations and Biomathematics"

organized by Department “Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis”

January 6, 2016, 11:00, room 503

Lecturer: Dr Peter Rashkov, Computational Biology Lab, College of Life and Environmental Sciences,
University of Exeter, UK

Title: Emergence of drug resistance in cancer from the perspective of environmental competition

Abstract. 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.