David Basanta, Moffit Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida, USA

"Ecology and Evolution in the Treatment of Cancer"

Despite all treatments available to fight cancers such as prostate, lung or myeloma, in too many cases the treatments lose their effectiveness before the cancer is completely eradicated. It is beginning to be recognized that evolution (in the Darwinian sense of the word) is the process responsible for the failure of current treatments. This evolution at the somatic level is easier to study and predict with the help of mathematical models, as long as those models are capable of capturing the biology that provides the substratum of evolution. In this talk I will try to introduce a series of mathematical models, developed in collaboration with experimental biologists at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, and emphasize the importance of modeling not only the heterogeneity of cancer but also the ecology of the organ in which the cancer grows.