Tuesday, November 26th, 2013
11:00am - 12:00pm, in Wheatley 3-VDC Venture Development Center

Leonid Hanin

Idaho State University

A new paradigm of cancer uncovered through mathematical modelling: what medical doctors won't tell you

Abstract: Over the last several decades, cancer has become a global pandemic of epic proportions. Unfortunately, treatment strategies resulting from the traditional approach to cancer have met with only limited success. This calls for a paradigm shift in our understanding and treating cancer. In this talk, we present a very general mathematical model of cancer progression in an individual patient accounting for primary tumor growth, shedding of metastases, their selection, dormancy and growth at secondary sites. Parameters of the model were estimated from the volumes of detectable bone metastases collected from one breast cancer patient and 12 prostate cancer patients. This allowed us to estimate, for each patient, the age at cancer onset and inception of all detected metastases, the expected metastasis latency time, and the rates of growth of metastases before and after the start of treatment. We found that for all patients (1) inception of the first metastasis occurred very early when the primary tumor was undetectable; (2) inception of all or most of detected metastases occurred before the start of treatment, which means that treatment of the primary tumor had only marginal effect, or no effect at all, on the number of metastases relevant to patients survival; and most importantly, (3) surgery and chemotherapy brought about a dramatic increase in the rate of growth of metastases. Although these findings contravene the conventional paradigm of cancer, they are supported by a vast body of experimental, clinical and epidemiological studies conducted over the last century.