Mathematical models for cancer

The importance of understanding the nature of cancer and finding effective treatment strategies needs no explanation. Numerous mathematical works paid tribute to investigations on this subject. However, the nature of the interaction between the size of the tumor and the prescribed treatment stays still unclear.

Professors Fimmel and Nürnberg as well as Y. Todorov together with Professor Bratus and Dr. Semenov from the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering (Moscow, Russia) are researching in the area of the mathematical modelling of treatment strategies for cancer from the perspective of the optimization theory. Y. Todorov prepared on this subject his Ph.D. thesis which will be defended in Moscow in December 2014.

Prof. Bratus and Dr. Semenov were guest lecturers and researchers in the faculty of Computer Sciences many times.

This cooperation resulted in several works on optimal and suboptimal leukemia and glioma therapies. The current plans are to extend the models under consideration regarding therapy-resistant cancer cells and a very important phenomenon, the angiogenesis, which consists in the emergence of new blood vessels to feed cancer cells.