Ecological resilience: an approach to understand the dynamics of Leukemia treatment

Date

Mar 9, 2017

Time

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Speaker

Artur Fassoni

Affiliation

Federal University of Itajubá Itajubá, Brazil

Series

IMB - Seminar

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Other Topics

Biologie, Medizin

Host

IMB

Description

Patient heterogeneity in cancer treatment is an important factor responsible for different treatment outcomes in individuals treated with the same protocol. Such differences may be a complete tumor regression in one individual and tumor relapse after some time in another. Many studies have shown that personalized therapies which consider individual traits may improve treatment outcomes. In this seminar, I'll present a mathematical approach which may help to understand these phenomena and has the potential to contribute with the developing of tailored treatments. Such approach is called "Ecological Resilience" and was first applied to ecological systems and electrical power systems. The resilience of an equilibrium state is related with the difficult to move the underlying dynamical system from this state to another one, completely different from the first. For systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) there are well-established mathematical structures which measure the resilience of an equilibrium state. I'll present a simple ODE model for cancer chemotherapy and use it to illustrate the potential of the resilience approach. In a few words, small differences between patients lead to different resilience measures with respect to treatment and these may lead to completely different long-term responses to the same treatment. Thus, resilience measures can be used as indicators for personalized treatments. In the end, I'll present how we intend to develop a project and use this approach to obtain clinically relevant results for Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). I’ll present a sketch of the steps in this direction: develop a specific ODE model for CML treatment, fit the model to data from clinical trials, calculate the resilience of each patient and use it to estimate treatment outcome.

Last modified: Feb 28, 2017, 11:36:39 AM