Lynch syndrome

Aysel Ahadova and myself, we have written a blog post on the official MathOnco blog to describe the importance of mathematical oncology in studying inherited colorectal cancer. We focus on the most common inherited colorectal cancer syndrome, Lynch syndrome, and give insights into our research projects here in Heidelberg, Germany.

My second first-author paper is out in Computational and Systems Oncology. In addition to the Kronecker model, we, researchers from Heidelberg and Leipzig, have developed a computational model for the biological processes occurring within single crypts, small entities of the colon, during early cancer development in Lynch syndrome. The computer simulations allow to unravel the otherwise invisible cancer formation process.

My first first-author paper is finally out in PLOS Computational Biology. With our amazing collaborators from EMCL, HITS, University Hospital Leipzig and ATB, we have developed a modular mathematical framework to model different molecular pathways of carcinogenesis based on a system of ordinary differential equations. The model makes use of the so-called Kronecker product, a specific structure which allows for a thorough mathematical analysis and medical interpretation. For the published paper, we focused on colorectal cancer development in Lynch syndrome with simulation results that are in concordance with current clinical tumor data.