Related papers: Understanding genomic alterations in cancer genome…
Tumor recurrence, driven by the evolution of drug resistance is a major barrier to therapeutic success in cancer. Resistance is often caused by genetic alterations such as point mutation, which refers to the modification of a single genomic…
Cancer stem cells are controlled by developmental networks that are often topologically indistinguishable from normal, healthy stem cells. The question is why cancer stem cells can be both phenotypically distinct and have morphological…
Cancer progression is driven by a small number of genetic alterations accumulating in a neoplasm. These few driver alterations reside in a cancer genome alongside tens of thousands of other mutations that are widely believed to have no role…
Drug resistance and metastasis - the major complications in cancer - both entail adaptation of cancer cells to stress, whether a drug or a lethal new environment. Intriguingly, these adaptive processes share similar features that cannot be…
An endogenous molecular-cellular network for both normal and abnormal functions is assumed to exist. This endogenous network forms a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system, with many stable attractors in its functional landscape. Normal or…
Cancers remain the lead cause of disease-related, pediatric death in North America. The emerging field of complex systems has redefined cancer networks as a computational system with intractable algorithmic complexity. Herein, a tumor and…
One of the key characteristics of cancer cells is an increased phenotypic plasticity, driven by underlying genetic and epigenetic perturbations. However, at a systems-level it is unclear how these perturbations give rise to the observed…
Cancer cells have the plasticity to adjust their metabolic phenotypes for survival and metastasis. During metastasis, a developmental program known as the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays a critical role. There is extensive…
Cancers follow a clonal Darwinian evolution, with fitter subclones replacing more quiescent cells, ultimately giving rise to macroscopic disease. High-throughput genomics provides the opportunity to investigate these processes and determine…
Cancer cell mutations occur when cells undergo multiple cell divisions, and these mutations can be spontaneous or environmentally-induced. The mechanisms that promote and sustain these mutations are still not fully understood. This study…
Responsible for many complex human diseases including cancers, disrupted or abnormal gene interactions can be identified through their expression changes correlating with the progression of a disease. However, the examination of all…
Environmental and genetic mutations can transform the cells in a co-operating healthy tissue into an ecosystem of individualistic tumour cells that compete for space and resources. Various selection forces are responsible for driving the…
Cancer, as the uncontrollable cell growth, is related to many branches of biology. In this review, we will discuss three mathematical approaches for studying cancer biology: population dynamics, gene regulation, and developmental biology.…
Tumors are defined by their intense proliferation, but sometimes cancer cells turn senescent and stop replicating. In the stochastic cancer model in which all cells are tumorigenic, senescence is seen as the result of random mutations,…
Metastatic prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men. In the advanced stages of prostate cancer, tumours can metastasise to other tissues in the body, which is fatal. In this thesis, we performed a genetic analysis of…
Comparative studies of cancer-related genes allow us to gain novel information about the evolution and function of these genes, but also to understand cancer as a driving force in biological systems and species life histories. So far,…
The main goal of Systems Biology research is to reconstruct biological networks for its topological analysis so that reconstructed networks can be used for the identification of various kinds of disease. The availability of high-throughput…
With the advancement of high-throughput biotechnologies, we increasingly accumulate biomedical data about diseases, especially cancer. There is a need for computational models and methods to sift through, integrate, and extract new…
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous regulatory molecules that modulate gene expression post-transcriptionally. Although differential expression of miRNAs have been implicated in many diseases (including cancers), the underlying…
Cancer is viewed as a multistep process whereby a normal cell is transformed into a cancer cell through the acquisition of mutations. We reduce the complexities of cancer progression to a simple set of underlying rules that govern the…