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Systems Biology DTC Monthly Seminar Series
MOAC Seminar Room
Top Floor, Senate House
2pm, Friday 2nd August, 2013
This month’s talk:
Towards a cancer ecology: linking cellular and tumour scales Cancer arises when the biological processes that control cell development – such as growth, death, and movement – become dysregulated through muta9ons. This might result in cells that do not die, cells that grow too quickly and cells migra9ng across the body. Understanding how these muta9ons change cell behaviour is key to understanding cancer, but gaining this understanding is fraught with difficulty. A promising route forward is to consider signalling pathways inside the cells, that is the network of interconnec9ons that regulate cell behaviour in response to environmental s9muli such as growth factors. Cancer disrupts this regula9on muta9ng pathway func9on; an9-­‐cancer drugs are designed to perturb pathways and restore normal cell behaviour. Computer models of cellular signalling offer a way of understanding how pathway interac9ons and drug interven9ons control cell behaviour. This lecture will present one such model of cell signalling and demonstrate its u9lity in enabling in silico hypothesis genera9on to inform laboratory experiments and drug discovery. Importantly, a cancer tumour is made up of many, many cells, crea9ng heterogeneous mul9-­‐ceullar structures with complex topologies. The lecture will also consider quan9fying that tumour structure. Beyond this the lecture will consider how state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art computer science can exploit mul9-­‐core hardware to help address what is probably the most serious scien9fic challenge facing cancer biology today: cell heterogeneity in tumours. This challenge requires a shiJ in perspec9ve from cancer biology to cancer ecology. Prof. Jim Bown
SIMBIOS Centre
School of Contemporary Sciences
University of Abertay Dundee