Title: Recent Developments in Cancer Research
Lecturer: Prof. Chin-Kun Hu from Academina Sinica (Taiwan)
Time: 14:30-15:30, Mar,03, 2017(Friday)
Address: The 2nd meeting-room, the 4th Floor, Biz School
Contact: Huijie Yang, HP: 13918669277
Abstract: Cancer is the leading cause of death in many countries. In this talk, I briefly review some recent developments in the theoretical studies of cancer research. We propose a modification of the Crow-Kimura and Eigen models of biological molecular evolution to include a mutator gene that causes both an increase in the mutation rate and a change in the fitness landscape. This mutator effect relates to a wide range of biomedical problems. There are three possible phases: mutator phase, mixed phase and non-selective phase. We calculate the phase structure, the mean fitness and the fraction of the mutator allele in the population, which can be applied to describe cancer development and RNA viruses [1]. We find that depending on the genome length, either the normal or the mutator allele dominates in the mixed phase. We analytically solve the model for a general fitness function. We conclude that the random fitness landscape is an appropriate choice for describing the observed mutator phenomenon in the case of a small fraction of mutators. It is shown that the increase in the mutation rates in the regular and the mutator parts of the genome should be set independently; only some combinations of these increases can push the complex biomedical system to the nonselective phase, potentially related to the eradication of tumors [1]. We have also found interesting results due to correlation between gene and pseudogene mRNAs in the control of cancer [2,3].
Reference
[1] David B. Saakian , Tatiana Yakushkina and Chin-Kun Hu: The rich phase of a mutator model, Scientific Reports 6, 34840 (2016).
[2] K. G. Petrosyan and C.-K. Hu: Fluctuation effects in gene reugulation by microRNAs and correlations between gene and pseudogene mRNAs in the control of cancer, Journal of Statistical Mechanics, P07019 (2015).
[3] K. G. Petrosyan and C.-K. Hu: Noise-induced multistability in the regulation of cancer by genes and pseudogenes, J. Chem. Phys. 145, 045102 (2016).
