Cancer as a complex adaptive system: mathematical models of tumor ecology, evolution and development
- Autores: Guim Aguadé Gorgorió
- Directores de la Tesis: Ricard Vicente Sole (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Tomás Alarcón Cor (presid.), Jordi García-Ojalvo (secret.), Alexander Robert Allan Anderson (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Biomedicina por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
Despite decades of scientific effort, cancer remains a major cause of death worldwide.
Through the accumulation of genome alterations, tumor populations evolve the capacity to circumvent the selective barriers of tissue homeostasis, eventually adapting to resist therapeutic stress. Furthermore, extensive Darwinian evolution is accompanied by an ecological engineering of the surrounding tissue micro-environment together with the al- teration of cellular maturation hierarchies. To understand cancer complexity, therefore, we need a picture that spans through the domains of ecology, evolution and development.
In an effort to gain understanding of the underlying patterns of treatment resistance, we introduce a mathematical approach to cancer complexity that takes into account its dy- namical nature across these three axes. The resulting modeling endeavor is focused on two major fields of current research: immunotherapy and cancer epigenetics and differ- entiation, with the aim of providing both insight in treatment design rationale and a com- prehensive perspective able to merge cancer ecological, evolutionary and developmental complexity.
