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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!
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
"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
1. Confuse the tumours with complex calculus.
2. When they're not expecting it, nab 'em!
Now fighting cancer is easy as pi!
Anonymous Coward
I thought I'd send a quick response to this. You can't get a nobel prize in Mathematics. I'm not sure if they could get one with this research for medicine though. I'm guessing it's that possible. Peace.
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
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.
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.
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 ;).
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.