Multiple pathways

This blog post explains how to build an ordinary differential equation system using the quite cool Kronecker structure to model multiple pathways of carcinogenesis for arbitrary types of cancer. It is based on our paper in PLOS Computational Biology, 2021 and was originally published on the MathOnco blog. Based on this blog post and our paper, Alexander Zeilmann and myself, we designed the CoverArt for the official Mathematical Oncology Newsletter, Week 166.

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.