Research Project:

 

"Hide & Seek: Cell Strategies to Survive in Chemotherapy"

topic: investigate a hypothesis that metastatic tumor cells in microenvironmental gradients can use different migration strategies to avoid lethal exposure to anti-cancer chemotherapeutic agents, and to become resistant to the drug.

Saharsh shows simulations that compare results of his simualtions of the cell colony growth model in which cells either can not actively migrate (left image) or move in a random fashion (right image).

August 5th 2016 -- Final presentation during the HIP-IMO Research Day.

 

Highlights from the final presentation:

Can tumor cells develop migratory strategies to develop drug resistance in microenvironment gradients? Can they play the "hide & seek" game? Exploring the tumor microenvironment and cell behavior within it can lead to more effective therapeutic protocols.

Five different modes of cell migration was considered (top-left). Each of them led to different characteristic cell traces (top-right). All identified sucessfull cases are listed in the table (bottom-left). One example of cells developing resistance to the drug is shown in the movie (bottom-right).

 

July 7th 2016, Saharsh discussed a PNAS publication by Wu et al. "Cell motility and drug gradients in the emergence of resistance to chemotherapy".