Related papers: Slowing evolution is more effective than enhancing…
Drug gradients are believed to play an important role in the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibiotics and tumors resistant to anti-cancer drugs. We use a statistical physics model to study the evolution of a population of malignant…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
We use fitness graphs, or directed cube graphs, for analyzing evolutionary reversibility. The main application is antimicrobial drug resistance. Reversible drug resistance has been observed both clinically and experimentally. If drug…
Antimicrobial resistance is an emerging global health crisis that is undermining advances in modern medicine and, if unmitigated, threatens to kill 10 million people per year worldwide by 2050. Research over the last decade has demonstrated…
The challenge in controlling stochastic systems in which low-probability events can set the system on catastrophic trajectories is to develop a robust ability to respond to such events without significantly compromising the optimality of…
Non-genetic forms of antimicrobial drug resistance can result from cell-to-cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non-genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of…
Populations can evolve in order to adapt to external changes. The capacity to evolve and adapt makes successful treatment of infectious diseases and cancer difficult. Indeed, therapy resistance has quickly become a key challenge for global…
Drug resistance remains a major problem for the treatment of HIV. Resistance can occur due to mutations that were present before treatment starts or due to mutations that occur during treatment. The relative importance of these two sources…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
The rise and spread of antibiotic resistance causes worsening medical cost and mortality especially for life-threatening bacteria infections, thereby posing a major threat to global health. Prescribing behavior of physicians is one of the…
The appearance of a new dangerous and contagious disease requires the development of a drug therapy faster than what is foreseen by usual mechanisms. Many drug therapy developments consist in investigating through different clinical trials…
The pace and unpredictability of evolution are critically relevant in a variety of modern challenges: combating drug resistance in pathogens and cancer, understanding how species respond to environmental perturbations like climate change,…
Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics through various mechanisms, with the specific mechanism depending on the drug-bacteria pair. It remains unclear, however, which resistance mechanism best supports favorable treatment outcomes,…
Investigating the emergence of a particular cell type is a recurring theme in models of growing cellular populations. The evolution of resistance to therapy is a classic example. Common questions are: when does the cell type first occur,…
Multidrug resistance consists of a series of genetic and epigenetic alternations that involve multifactorial and complex processes, which are a challenge to successful cancer treatments. Accompanied by advances in biotechnology and…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Resistance to chemotherapies, particularly to anticancer treatments, is an increasing medical concern. Among the many mechanisms at work in cancers, one of the most important is the selection of tumor cells expressing resistance genes or…
Antimicrobial resistance is a threat to public health with millions of deaths linked to drug resistant infections every year. To mitigate resistance, common strategies that are used are combination therapies and therapy switching. However,…
Bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment is a huge concern: introduction of any new antibiotic is shortly followed by the emergence of resistant bacterial isolates in the clinic. This issue is compounded by a severe lack of new…