MCMC Seminar Speakers

TBA

Kit Curtius

(Upcoming) September 9, 2025, 9:00 a.m. PDT

TBA

Modeling tumor heterogeneity to understand the clinical efficacy of combination therapy

Adam Palmer

May 13, 2025

Seminar Recording Link

Tumor heterogeneity is a central difficulty of cancer treatment and causes practically all cancer therapies to vary in effectiveness between patients. Combination therapy is a key strategy to overcome heterogeneity, but predicting which drug combinations will be effective has been a long unsolved problem. Because single drugs are variably effective, we have built models around the idea that combination therapy in human populations involves ‘variable effects plus variable effects’. I will describe studies that apply this principle to understand and to accurately predict the population-level activity of combination therapies in human clinical trials, including treatments with curative effect.

Understanding, predicting and controlling stochastic cancer evolution

Rob Noble

March 4, 2025

Seminar Recording Link

Understanding the nature of tumour evolution promises to enable more accurate prognostic methods and more effective treatment strategies. I will use three examples to illustrate how the analysis of stochastic processes can aid this goal by bridging the gap between ODE/PDE models and agent-based simulations. First, I will show how surprisingly simple mathematical expressions can be derived to explain why selective sweeps (the spread of beneficial mutations through an entire population) are rare except when tumours are relatively very small. Next, I will explain how studying tree generating processes and tree shape indices can improve model selection and clinical forecasting methods. Finally, I will present an application of stochastic processes to improving cancer cure rates by minimizing the probability of evolutionary rescue. Although all this work is motivated by questions in cancer research, the methods and results are readily applicable to other biological systems.