cancer and the cell cycle

Last Friday I came to the Max Planck Instute for Cell Biology, at the other side of Dresden, to attend a series of seminars including one from a colleague and friend of mine, Babis Hatzikirou, about the cell cycle.

The classical view on the cell cycle can be seen in this picture that I took from Babis's presentation (and which I suspect he took from somewhere else :)):
This is quite interesting although not precisely research news. Most of the cell cycle is of course devoted to interphase and only a minority of the time (assuming that the cell is not in arrest mode) is devoted to create a copy of itself (through mitosis and cytokinesis). The cell cycle is controlled by a finely tuned balance of proteins cdc2-cdc13 and a number of checkpoints make sure that before changing the phase of the cell cycle everything is in order. These checkpoints and their associated proteins (such as the famous TP53) are quite critical to prevent tumour formation as they impede the growth of cells that need DNA repair.

brief introduction to cancer research using game theory

I gave yesterday a small and informal presentation on the research done in cancer using game theory. For whoever might be interested, the results are here.

hi again

This is really the second post. I thought it would be a sensible idea to rename the blog I created yesterday (the cancer game) since its name might be misunderstood. My aim is to study carcinogenesis (the process by which healthy cells are transformed into cancer cells) using a number of mathematical tools such as Cellular Automata and Game Theory, thus the name 'the cancer game'. Of course (and I repeat myself) I am not implying that cancer could be considered a game in the sense of something funny or amusing but in the sense that game theory could be used to study the dynamics of cancer progression.

More to come soon (hopefully not in the front of 'apologies').