Related papers: Commentary: The nature of cancer research
Cancer, as a complex and devastating sickness, poses a great public health challenge on a global scale. Its far-attaining impact necessitates a devoted branch of medicine referred to as oncology, which makes a specialty in the prevention,…
Understanding the cross-species behavior of cancer is important for uncovering fundamental mechanisms of carcinogenesis, and for translating results of model systems between species. One of the most famous interspecific considerations of…
Is it possible to understand cancer? Or more specifically, is it possible to understand cancer from genetic side? There already many answers in literature. The most optimistic one has claimed that it is mission-possible. Duesberg and his…
The role of continua has been clear since antiquity in the mathematical approaches to physics, while discrete manifolds were brought to the limelight mostly by Quantum and Information Theories, in the XX century. We first recall how…
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…
Despite the spectacular achievements of molecular biology in the second half of the twentieth century and the crucial advances it permitted in cancer research, the fight against cancer has brought some disillusions. It is nowadays more and…
As the past decade barely dawned, a fundamentally novel view of cancer relating to signal transduction through intracellular hormones/growth factors and their subunits began to unfold. Further along, it gained additional substance with the…
We present a general computational theory of cancer and its developmental dynamics. The theory is based on a theory of the architecture and function of developmental control networks which guide the formation of multicellular organisms.…
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…
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.…
It is proposed that cancer results from the breakdown of universal control mechanisms which developed in mutual association as part of the historical process that brought individual cells together into multi-cellular communities. By…
Genomic alterations lead to cancer complexity and form a major hurdle for a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying oncogenesis. In this review, we describe the recent advances in studying cancer-associated genes…
A small but growing number of people are finding interesting parallels between ecosystems as studied by ecologists (think of a Savanna or the Amazon rain forest or a Coral reef) and tumours1-3. The idea of viewing cancer from an ecological…
Classical models of cancer focus on tumour-intrinsic genetic aberrations and immune dynamics and often overlook how the metabolic environment of healthy tissues shapes tumour development and immune efficacy. Here, we propose that…
Cancer progression involves the sequential accumulation of genetic alterations that cumulatively shape the tumour phenotype. In prostate cancer, tumours can follow divergent evolutionary trajectories that lead to distinct subtypes, but the…
Cancer has been characterized as a constellation of hundreds of diseases differing in underlying mutations and depending on cellular environments. Carcinogenesis as a stochastic physical process has been studied for over sixty years, but…
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 are complex adaptive diseases regulated by the nonlinear feedback systems between genetic instabilities, environmental signals, cellular protein flows, and gene regulatory networks. Understanding the cybernetics of cancer requires…
Cancer is a complex disease driven by dynamic regulatory shifts that cannot be fully captured by individual molecular profiling. We employ a data-driven approach to construct a coarse-grained dynamic network model based on hallmark…
Doctors are well aware that sometimes cancer treatments not only fail, but even work backwards, i.e. they make the treated tumor grow. In this work we present a mathematical perspective on this paradox in the case of chemotherapy, by…