The Final Club EvMed of the Semester!
Theme: Translated “wins” for Evolutionary Medicine
Dr. Jacob Sott
Wednesday, December 13th
12:00 PM EST
Perturbing the evolutionary mechanisms and ecological forces underlying drug resistance in cancer and pathogens: evolutionary therapy and formal control
Summary
Cancer and drug resistant infections are the leading causes of death in the developed world. These two processes are fundamentally very similar in that they are heterogeneous collections of individual agents which evolve and interact to optimize the fitness of the population. In this talk I will outline these similarities and walk through recent work to directly parameterize mathematical models of each of the evolutionary and ecological aspects of the emergence of drug resistance. We will then discuss how these models can be used to derive control protocols to delay, or minimize the probability of drug resistance.
Bio
Jacob Scott is a veteran of the US Navy submarine force turned academic physician-scientist. His lab pursues research decomposing the complexity of cancer through mathematical modeling and the biological and clinical validation of these models. With an educational background in physics, medicine, mathematics and engineering Jake has a unique perspective on cancer and systems biology and communicates and collaborates with professionals across many disciplines. After medical school at Case Western Reserve University, Jake pursued a residency in Radiation Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center. Feeling frustrated with the one-size-fits-all approach in modern oncology, he took a hiatus to pursue a PhD in mathematical biology at the University of Oxford, where his thesis focused on the role of heterogeneity and evolution, both genetic and microenvironmental, on cancer evolution and radiation response – a theme which is now his laboratory’s focus.
