Check out a post I wrote over at the Theory, Evolution, and Games Group blog on some of our work at the 2016 Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) Workshop! The link for that post is at the bottom of this post.
It details a really neat model we created to interrogate a system of cytokine signaling and cancer treatment. For those unfamiliar with the IMO Workshop/competition, five teams of a dozen or so researchers, all from different backgrounds, are formed at the beginning of the week, and quickly decide on an interesting research problem they can tackle. Each team has a few physicians and scientists stationed at the Moffitt Cancer Center, where the competition is held, that act as mentors. The groups spend the four days working and researching and planning ahead, and on the last day they all present their completed and proposed work. Oh, did I mention that $50,000 of future funding is on the line? The winning team gets the $$ to complete their proposed research.
This sets the stage for an awesome week-long hackathon, where longer and longer workdays culminate in an inevitable all-nighter as mathematicians and computational biologists and physicians and new colleagues perfect their models and presentations.
So, there we were, 35 hours or so away from the final presentation, when we all decided we needed a spatially-explicit model of cytokine diffusion and cell response. I had created spatially-explicit simulations of cell turnover before, so I volunteered to lead the analysis. And, like the scientist in an action movie rushing to find the vaccine for the zombie virus before the meteor strikes (or something), I worked overnight in my hotel room, and all the next day, and delivered this video and results right before the final presentation:
(For more information on what the video is showing, check out the post linked below or our preprint.)
It was only 2 slides worth of work within our whole presentation, just to give you a sense of how much everyone in the group accomplished during the week. But it was actually a ton of fun rushing to get everything together and connected. And, we won the competition!
Greetings, Theory, Evolution, and Games Group! It’s a pleasure to be on the other side of the keyboard today. Many thanks to Artem for the invite to write about some of our recent work and the opportunity to introduce myself via this post. I do a bit of blogging of my own over at vcannataro.com […]
via Dark selection from spatial cytokine signaling networks — Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
Vincent Cannataro, Ph.D. 