Month: July 2013
Interview at the 2013 NCI PS-OC Annual Meeting
I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by Pauline Davies at the 2013 Physical Sciences-Oncology Annual Meeting. (I gave one of the addresses–“Exploring Possibilities for Next-Generation Computational Cancer Models that Work Together”–at the meeting; agenda available here.) The interview (largely in layman’s terms) discusses mathematical and computational modeling of cancer, the potential role for computational modeling in understanding cancer and making predictions that could help patients and their doctors make treatment choices, and the need for model and data standardizations to enable better predictions in the future. The interview draws parallels to hurricane predictions, where multiple models can read/write standardized data and be combined to improve their accuracy.
My interview can be found here, as can the entire set of selected 2013 interviews. You can find more information on my lab and work at MathCancer.org.
I really want to thank Pauline Davies, Jonathan Franca-Koh and the NCI Office of Physical Sciences in Oncology for the opportunity for this discussion!
Paul Macklin interviewed at 2013 PSOC Annual Meeting
Paul Macklin gave a plenary talk at the 2013 NIH Physical Sciences in Oncology Annual Meeting. After the talk, he gave an interview to the Pauline Davies at the NIH on the need for data standards and model compatibility in computational and mathematical modeling of cancer. Of particular interest:
Pauline Davies: How would you ever get this standardization? Who would be responsible for saying we want it all reported in this particular way?
Paul Macklin: That’s a good question. It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg problem. Who’s going to come and give you data in your standard if you don’t have a standard? How do you plan a standard without any data? And so it’s a bit interesting. I just think someone needs to step forward and show leadership and try to get a small working group together, and at the end of the day, perfect is the enemy of the good. I think you start small and give it a go, and you add more to your standard as you need it. So maybe version one is, let’s say, how quickly the cells divide, how often they do it, how quickly they die, and what their oxygen level is, and maybe their positions. And that can be version one of this standard and a few of us try it out and see what we can do. I think it really comes down to a starting group of people and a simple starting point, and you grow it as you need it.
Shortly after, the MultiCellDS project was born (using just this strategy above!), with the generous assistance of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Read / Listen to the interview: http://physics.cancer.gov/report/2013report/PaulMacklin.aspx (2013)