Nature papers and reviews

For those of you interested in Cancer (and I assume that if you read this blog then that is probably the case), check out Nature’s special “New horizon’s in cancer“. Sounds interesting and hopefully it will be as good as Science’s Cancer research special back in May. It looks a little bit too centered in molecular biology but that is what most of the readership of Nature would want.

The website is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/cancerhorizons/index.html

For those of you without access to Nature’s subscription-only website, here is a free article in the collection: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature05085.html

*additionally* you might want to take a look at some article that some guys in London and I have worked on. It is not about cancer but about evolution: how evolution can bring about robustness.

The name of the paper is “The evolution of robust homeostasis and stem cell-like behaviour in artificial multicellular organisms” and you can find it here:
http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/2006/08/the_evolution_of_robust_homeos.html

Take a look if you have the time and even a mild interest in computational evolution. It is also written in a very readable style (thanks to Buzz).

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cancer and evolution

What does cancer have to do with evolution?

Quite a lot: evolution is one of the defining features of cancer. In multicellular organisms cells cooperate in order to achieve a common goal: to preserve the organism. In a tissue containing a tumour the situation changes: mutations bring about a diversity of genotypes in which some cells will have a higher potential to reproduce and survive than others. In effect an ecosystem is created in which different individuals compete for a limited amount of resources, often to the point of destroying the ecosystem, that is, the organism.

This evolutionary nature of cancer has consequences that affect potential treatments. Since any given tumour will contain a number of different tumour cells, a therapy that is successful at eradicating one type of tumour cell might only make it easier for a different type to spread through. For a treatment to be successful its creators should consider how the ecosystem will be altered and what kind of evolutionary dynamics will be favoured.

Understanding the driving forces of cancer evolution is likely to be a necessary step to understand (and hopefully deal with) cancer. For that reason it would be interesting to see how models of what is beginning to be called computational evolution (nice article in Nature review Genetics, vol 7, september 2006, pp729-735) can be used to study evolution in the context of cancer.

hi again

This is really the second post. I thought it would be a sensible idea to rename the blog I created yesterday (the cancer game) since its name might be misunderstood. My aim is to study carcinogenesis (the process by which healthy cells are transformed into cancer cells) using a number of mathematical tools such as Cellular Automata and Game Theory, thus the name ‘the cancer game’. Of course (and I repeat myself) I am not implying that cancer could be considered a game in the sense of something funny or amusing but in the sense that game theory could be used to study the dynamics of cancer progression.

More to come soon (hopefully not in the front of ‘apologies’).