Contributions in quantitative modeling of metastasis

Date/heure
8 novembre 2018
10:45 - 11:45

Oratrice ou orateur
Sébastien Benzekry

Catégorie d'évènement
Séminaire Probabilités et Statistique


Résumé

In the majority of solid cancers, secondary tumors (metastases) and associated complications are the main cause of death. In order to define the optimal therapeutic strategy for a given patient, one of the major current challenges is to estimate, at diagnosis, the burden of invisible metastases and how they will respond to treatments. In this talk, I will present research efforts towards the establishment of a predictive computational tool of metastatic development, with a particular emphasis on the assessment of mathematical models to empirical data (both experimental and clinical). I will first present the model’s framework, which is based on a physiologically-structured partial differential equation for the time dynamics of a population of metastases, combined to a nonlinear mixed-effects model for statistical representation of the distribution of the parameters in the population. Then, I will show results about the descriptive power of the model on data from clinically relevant ortho-surgical animal models of metastasis (breast and kidney tumors), with recent findings about differential effect of therapies between primary and secondary tumors. The talk will further be devoted to the translation of this modeling approach toward the clinical reality. Using clinical imaging data of brain metastasis from non-small cell lung cancer, several biological processes will be investigated to establish a minimal and biologically realistic model able to describe the data. Integration of this model into a biostatistical approach for individualized prediction of the model’s parameters from data only available at diagnosis will also be discussed. Together, these results represent a step forward towards the integration of mathematical modeling as a predictive tool for personalized medicine in oncology.