Abstract:
Tumors can be regarded as multicellular complex system of interacting cellular decision-makers. Decisions of interacting cells allow for the emergence of higher order organizational structures, such as tumors. At the same time, the new emergent structures exert selective forces on the cell phenotype decision dynamics. Here I investigate the impact on tumor development of a particular type of cancer cell decision-making the so-called migration/proliferation phenotypic plasticity (or ”Go-or-Grow”) found in brain tumors. This mechanism implies a mutually exclusive switching between migratory and proliferative phenotypes. In this talk, I will discuss the identification and the effect of Go-or-Grow dependency on local tumor cell density in terms of brain tumor initiation, persistency, invasion and potential therapeutic implications.
Bio:
Dr. Haralampos (Babis) Hatzikirou is an applied mathematician interested in complex systems related to mainly biomedical problems and also for bio-inspired algorithms. His research is divided into (i) modeling of biological multicellular systems, (ii) development of tools for multiscale mathematical modeling and analysis, and (iii) design of bio-inspired decision-making algorithms for multi-agent systems. Dr. Hatzikirou received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2009 from TU Dresden, a MSc in Industrial Mathematics-Technomathematik from TU Kaiserslautern and a Diploma in Mathematics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is currently leading his group in the Braunschweig Integrated Centre of Systems Biology (BRICS) and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI).