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Fighting Cancer with Math
zoloback writes "A group of scientists have developed a mathematical method to fight certain forms of cancer. The study has taken the team several years, but the first trial on a human has been successful. You can read the actual paper. It looks like a huge advancement in science, because there's a possibility to extrapolate the method to other types of cancer" From the article: "The researchers have evidence to show that all tumors grow in the same way, irrespective of the tissue or species in which they develop. In a previous paper, these researchers reported that tumor growth, rather than being exponential as commonly believed, is a much slower "linear" process similar to the growth of certain crystals and other natural phenomena."
But she blinded me with science!
I'm Dancin Santa, bitch!
If this works the way they say it does, then all I can say is that someone has just won a nobel prize.
Im very Impressed Im sure. But its not really fighting cancer with math, just creating a good model on how to repond with the treatments we have.
Go Away! Not for Sale
I've been recovering from a broken finger the past month or so. I've studied the stemcell research describing the process. And what would otherwise be vague itching, swelling and aching instead resolves to actual awareness of incremental growth in the new tissue. I've modified the splint in feedback with the changing critical anatomical areas, and already have much more mobility than the literature describes. Before it's even completely healed. As we do more research on these self-organizing cellular growth systems, we'll be able to work with these tissues, facilitating their growth for maximum recovery with minimum risk and downtime. Theraputic stemcells are just the mannered cousins of tumorcells - we might very well live to see a day when they're all domesticated for our health, and even recreation.
--
make install -not war
"Nurse quick I need 20cc's of the quadratic equation STAT!!!"
Remind me of the joke on how mathematicians fight fire...
A physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel in separate rooms. A fire breaks out in the physicist's bathroom. The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, does some calculations on his calculator, fills a cup of water, and throws it at the base of the fire putting it out while getting the rest of the bathroom hardly wet at all, and then goes back to sleep.
A fire breaks out in the engineer's bathroom later that night. The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, runs into the hallway and brings the firehose into the bathroom and lets the stream go full blast. After a minute or so, the fire is out, and the bathroom is soaking wet with water dripping everywhere, but the fire is out and the engineer goes back to bed.
A fire breaks out in the mathematician's room. The mathematician wakes up and sees the fire, does some lengthy calculations on paper, lights a match and drops it in a glass of water, says "It can be done", and goes back to bed.
I'm sorry, but my faith does not allow for medical/mathematical intervention. You must allow my child to die to fulfill god's glorious plan.
You can stuff all your "evolution" and "math" voodoo. Fucking heathens!
The breakthrough lies in the connection between the variables that allow a tumor to grow and the control that can be put over those variables, a lot of these were never considered before (such as barometric pressure inside the mass, and blood vessel proliferation).
This are easily controllable factors, so instead of treating the tumor by trying to kill the cells via radio or chemical therapy, they attack the factors that (in a mathematical model) determine the growth of the tumor, turning them into negative variables and therefore extinguishing the mass
The future will take care of itself.. It has in the past
What's next, a 'Grow Your Own Cancer' kit like those crystal ones? I hope it works better than the crystal ones do...
1. Confuse the tumours with complex calculus.
2. When they're not expecting it, nab 'em!
Umm... yeah. That's how radiation therapy works. It isn't because of the fact that cancer cells, as their DNA is often times in an exposed, vulnerable state to to rapid division, is more succeptible to damage from the radiaton (or chemotherapy) dose than most non-carcinomic cells are.
Now fighting cancer is easy as pi!
Anonymous Coward
http://www.hypography.com/article.cfm?id=34220
;) turns out the only math the used was in calculating how tumours grow, and how they prevent immune responses, so they figured out an immune system response they can trigger that will cause the cells that cause tumours to grow to become a 'target' of the patients immune system. no math equasion used to 'cure' it at all, just a little deductive reasoning and science...
http://physics.about.com/b/a/088887.htm
the blog entry that they linked to was kinda vauge on details
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
could someone explain it to me?
It's simple, really. The cancer can't survive if the host organism is dead. Therefore scientists have proposed boring cancer sufferers to death with complex mathematical proofs, hence killing the cancerous cells and preventing the patient from having to suffer the horrible death that cancer brings.
It is not the point that the boring mathematical proofs are a more painful death that the years of suffering at the hands of cancer and conventional treatments.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Unfortunately some of the most promising drugs that work to shrink tumors are not improving survival rates whatsoever. They are, in fact, shrinking the tumors "like they're supposed to", but this isn't doing anything to stop progression of the cancer.
I suggest you read Slashdot
how much are we tempting Nature to change the formula
Cancer is an anomaly of mitosis; it is not an organism and therefore does not evolve. The body regularly squashes cells which go into a sort-of mitotic infinite loop, and that's the end of that. It's the ones that the immune system does not recognize that grow into tumors.
The paper was published in 2003 and was cited twice in total - by themselves (I just checked Web of Science).
If there would be a real advancement behind this, many people would use it. Sad but true, but they sound like quacks.
From what I read in the article, they were just able to simulate something resembling real tumours using a linear growth model. But then the article itself says in the discussion that no one has ever observed non-linear exponential growth in real tumors anyways so people (with the possible exception of other modelers) have obviously taken this into account. Not clear to me whether any of the results from their model are novel nor are their assertions about the nutrient dependence of tumor growth convincing without some real experiments.
As a computational biologist, I'm not knocking the usefulness of these types of mathematical approaches - and what they seem to have is a nice and maybe even a correct tumorigensis model, but let's keep it real - this is far from a cure for cancer...
But in the US they would say "Nurse, quick I need 21/32nds of an ounce of..."
This stuff's been done for years - just google "gompertz cancer" and you'll see what I mean. I was part of a team that developed a mathematical model for the growth (and cure - using a modified virus, but that's a whole different story) of multiple myeloma in immunodeficient mice. Perhaps they've applied a new model (I only glanced at the paper), but this certainly isn't the first time and it certainly won't be the last time research along these lines has taken place. A lot of very smart people have spent decades working on such research.
Of course it's great to see an advancement in science, particularly applied math, but those calling for the Nobel should take a deep breath and relax - cancer isn't going away anytime soon.
A cure for cancer? By using math? Astounding!
This shouldn't be so astounding. After all, for many it's already cured insomnia.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Thank you.
There is a follow-up article criticizing the original article: abstract
And a response by the original authors: abstract
In any event, it's a little premature to celebrate. Their follow-up work in mice (abstract) used implanted tumours. It is already known that tumours have the capacity to evade immune response, and we should not be surprised that implanting a foreign tumour mass into a host and stimulating the immune system will provoke a favourable response. The situation is more complicated when trying to raise the immune system to attack a tumour comprised of one's own cells. It seems to me that, at this point, they are trying to prove their particular growth model, not developing a de facto cure.
That their devised strategy worked on a single human subject is cause for optimism, and nothing more. That work has not been published (that I could find), so there is no way to properly assess the result. At this point, they are more than likely drumming up press to ensure continued funding for their research... not that there's anything wrong with that ;).
Link
And some detail on how it works...
I'm too much of a damn pessimist to believe it's true after reading something similar to this just about every week followed by "could lead to treatments"... Here's hoping I'm wrong.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Tumor growth rates are a hotly debated topic. This paper contains some interesting ideas. But the headline incorrectly suggests that "fighting cancer with math" is something new. Biologists have been using mathematics, including differential equations and fractals for as long as they have been around (in fact, a lot of math comes from biological problems).
On quick reading, this paper seems to argue primarily that it is not nutrients, but cell diffusion, that limits cancer growth rates. That hypothesis is supported by observing similarities between the growth behavior and shapes created by processes in that class and real tumors. Interesting, but only weak evidence. They'll need to refine their hypothesis and test it more directly experimentally.
At the risk of trolling beyond my bounds...
It irks me to hear a good joke all the way to the end, only to find someone botched the punchline. Thank you fellow mathematician for enlightening us to the real deal.
Just so this isn't a pure fluff-post, here's a link to the abstract of the original paper from clinical studies in mice, published in Physical Review Letters, June 7, 2004. Mind you this has only been tested in one human case study and they make no claims to generalize this to other forms of cancer.
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
I will most likely download the full report tomorrow from the university.
Actually, unregulated mitosis is just one of the mutations that contributes to cancer. Some of the others include: genetic instability, resistance to apoptosis signaling (i.e. no cell suicide,) ability to recruit vasculature, ability to migrate (i.e. reduce cell-cell bonding and increased motility,) ability to survive in novel body environments. These are loosely related to the "stages" of cancer.
Each of these mutations is selected for by very stringent competition for nutrients both among cancer cells themselves and the body's normal cells. There is a very real type of evolution occuring, and as the cancer cells begin to ignore the signals coming from nearby cells and their behavior represents their own individual interests rather than the interests of the body as a whole--they have in a very literal sense become an independent organism. It is not exactly analogous to a speciation event, but it is related.
A literature search for "evolution" and "cancer" would return a number of papers that borrow models from evolutionary biology to model cancer.
The excitement over this paper, or "treatment" is perhaps a bit premature. Scaling treatment is a common and quite popular approach in many growth phenomena, and has been investigated to death in the context of crystal growth (MBE, molecular beam epitaxy), but ironically, the equation that bears the name "MBE equation" does not actually describe MBE growth correctly (in my view). Therefore, saying that equation (2) in the original paper describes the physical process of "surface diffusion" in the case of MBE or surface cancer cells is highly suspect. The growth of the cancer cells might be well approximated by the growth MBE equation (2), but this is mere curve fitting, and a closer look at the underlying physical mechanisms is more important than getting good fits.
Therefore your gender has nothing to do with your contracting aviary cancer.
Very astute observation. It's most likely your species that dictates your ability to develop aviary cancer.
ovarian cancer is completely impossible without ovaries, just like it is impossible for a female to get testicular cancer.
Don't oppress me, you insensitive clod!
I have an idea. Suppose I agree that I can't actually have ovarian cancer, not having ovaries, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that I can have the right to have ovarian cancer. It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
The article seems a bit short on details. Like what treatments they are implimenting based on the formula. Or do they just write formulae down on paper and feed them to the patient?
I'm sorry, but my faith does not allow for medical/mathematical intervention. You must allow my child to die to fulfill god's glorious plan.
Shouldn't be a problem if you're Catholic. Remember: it is perfectly acceptable for Catholics to prevent pregnancy with mathematics, though sinful to use physics or chemistry.