Arne Traulsen
Max Planck Institute, Plön, Germany
Somatic evolution in hierarchical tissue structures
[When and where]
Cancer can be viewed as an evolutionary process, where the accumulation of mutations in a cell eventually causes cancer. Many tissues such as the blood system, the colon or the skin, are organized hierarchically. This strongly affects the dynamics in these tissues and inhibits the accumulation of mutations. Mutations arising in primitive cells can lead to long lived or even persistent clones, but mutations arising in further differentiated cells are short lived and do not affect the organism. A generic mathematical model for such tissue structures can be used to model the somatic evolution in various cancers, such as certain Leukemias. However, it remains a challenge to fix the parameters of these models from experimental data. In particular, concrete predictions for disease dynamics within an individual typically require repeated measurements - but this is often unfeasible in a medical context. However, certain biomarkers have properties that allow to derive all relevant parameters from a single measurement, leading to dynamical predictions.
Keynote
Updated June 22, 2015, by Minus