Remember what Pragyesh found regarding the response of glioblastoma cells to chemotherapy with temozolomide (TMZ)? Here is it again (see the picture on the left): cells respond to the drug with a delay. Now, thanks to the computer simulation (middle- and right-hand pictures) developed by Saumil Shah (a visitor from Ploen) we can model this process mathematically.
The model has been inspired by a mathematical model of multi-stage cell cycle and an agent-based model. We have added treatment-driven death and calibrated the model against our data. In the model, cancer cells go through different cell cycle stages and are affected by the drug during only a specific stage in the cell cycle. This makes the model more biologically realistic than the simple birth-and-death process used to model the evolution of resistance to chemtherapy, which is what we ultimately want to do.
This research has been supported by the POLS programme, funded through Norway Grants.
Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria 