Reimagining cancer treatments
By Poornima Apte
The good news: In the fight against cancer, new therapies break through at an impressive clip. The bad news: Only a minimal percentage of these promising avenues receive FDA approval.
The Therapy Modeling & Design Center (TMDC) in the College of Science and Engineering is hoping to rectify this problem. It’s using mathematical modeling to, among other things, test the viability of cancer therapies. Professors Jasmine Foo (mathematics), Kevin Leder (industrial and systems engineering), and David Odde (biomedical engineering) spearhead the interdisciplinary initiative launched in winter 2024.
“We’re interested in how new therapies that are being developed could be more effective and likely to be successful when they go into clinical trials,” Odde said. “Understanding the therapy in the context of the disease, and possibly on a patient-by-patient basis, is a large unmet need in the field.”
In addition to this “unmet need” related to drug therapies, mathematical modeling can address a variety of other aspects of cancer research, including the mechanisms by which tumors propagate and the selection of optimal patient populations to test drugs. Because mathematical models are digital captures of real-world phenomena, researchers can use them to simulate various what-if scenarios quickly.
The alternative, relying on lab-based cell culture experiments, takes much longer.
“If I have a hypothesis about how a particular gene is impacting cancer progression, for example, but don’t know if that’s true,mathematical modeling is one less time-consuming way to help with that process,” Foo said.
The TMDC got its start when Foo and Odde started discussing their mutual interest in using mathematical modeling to study cancer and biological systems. TMDC was made possible by funding from the College of Science and Engineering and the Masonic Cancer Center. In addition, critical grant writing support is provided through the Institute for Engineering in Medicine’s Center Accelerator program and the Cancer Bioengineering Initiative.
“Making a difference on this disease was a goal for both of us,” Foo said.
The interdisciplinary founders also knew the robust startup ecosystem at the University of Minnesota (and in the rest of the state) could benefit from the center’s expertise. The center is working with therapy developers—many are based in the University’s Medical School—to troubleshoot and fine-tune implementations. An especially exciting project on the docket is gene-editing a patient’s own immune cells and using them as a therapeutic agent.
While not an immediate focus, personalized medicine is also on TMDC’s radar.
“We’re making important advances toward that goal. Each person is different, and we can encode those differences mathematically and be able to better identify the right patients for the right therapies,” Odde said.
The TMDC’s larger goals are ones shared by all initiatives in oncology.
“We are trying to contribute to a larger effort of improving cancer outcomes and optimizing the pace of development of the therapies we have,” Foo said. “What’s novel about our approach is the mathematical modeling perspective. We’re in an age of team science. We’re contributing a different perspective to the overarching collective team goal of delivering progress in oncology.”
Odde agrees that success would have a major impact for cancer patients.
“If our efforts are successful, that would mean the success rate in clinical trials will be higher,” Odde said. “That means the cost per new therapy that comes on the market might be lower. I hope we can bring down the cost and make more therapies available to more people through mathematical modeling. That could ultimately save lives.”