Board Of Interest
Believe it or not the we still use blackboards, as opposed to whiteboards, a great deal when developing our research. It harks back to our teaching days when there was only blackboards to write on and are still pretty much standard in every mathematics department in the UK. Also unlike markers chalk always works. To be honest we will write on pretty much anything that has a surfuce, glass walls and windows included! Here we will present a selection of boards that highlight research very much in development and discuss them briefly whenever we get the chance.
Modelling Cooperation
Using EGT to understand interactions between microenvironment dependent and independent tumor populations.
Here David Basanta and I were trying to define an Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) model that studies the evolution of three different cell populations over time: Cooperative cells, a dependent tumour phenotype that benefits from interactions with the coopertive cells by supporting their growth, and an independent tumour phenotype that does not require microenvironmental support. This model served as the foundation for a game between stroma (cooperative cells), microenvironment dependent and independent cells applied to the clinical problem of metastatic prostate cancer and was published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2012 - see Table 1 in that paper for comparison.
Up and coming boards...
A critical question in drug resistence centes on wether a resistant population already exists or evolves.
Growth vs Invasion
Discussing how tumors grow - migration vs proliferation and which is the key driver and what constrains them.
Discussing how the different players of the Tyrosine kinase signaling pathway are altered in melanoma.