Jean Clairambault : Drug resistance in cancer: biological and medical issues, and continuous models of structured population dynamics

Considering cancer as an evolutionary disease, we aim at understanding the means by which cancer cell populations develop resistance mechanisms to drug therapies, in order to circumvent them by using optimised therapeutic combinations. Rather than focusing on molecular mechanisms such as overexpression of intracellular drug processing enzymes or ABC transporters that are responsible for resistance at the individual cell level, we propose to introduce abstract phenotypes of resistance structuring cancer cell populations. The models we propose rely on continuous adaptive dynamics of cell populations, and are amenable to predict asymptotic evolution of these populations with respect to the phenotypic traits of interest. Drug-induced drug resistance, the question we are tackling from a theoretical and experimental point of view, may be due to biological mechanisms of different natures, mere local regulation, epigenetic modifications (reversible, nevertheless inheritable) or genetic mutations (irreversible), according to the extent to which the genome of the cells in the population is affected. In this respect, the models we develop are more likely to be biologically corresponding to epigenetic modifications, although eventual induction of emergent resistant cell clones due to mutations under drug pressure is not to be completely excluded. From the biologist's point of view, we study phenotypically heterogeneous, but genetically homogeneous, cancer cell populations under stress by drugs. According to the cell populations at stake and to the exerted drug pressure, is drug resistance in cancer a permanently acquired phenotypic trait or is it reversible? Can it be avoided or overcome by rationally (model-guided) designed combinations of drugs? These are some of the questions we will try to answer in a collaboration between a team of mathematicians and another one of biologists, both dealing with cancer and Darwinian - possibly also Lamarckian - evolution of cell populations.

• Category: Mathematical Biology
• Duration: 01:14:47
• Date:  October 30, 2015 at 11:55 AM
• Views: 120
• Tags:   seminar, Mathematical Biology Seminar