Kevin Leder Awarded Seed Grant Funding for Cancer Therapy Proposal

The Norwegian Centennial Chair Program has awarded seed grant funding to ISyE Associate Professor Kevin Leder for his cancer therapy research proposal.

In the first year of Leder's project, he will receive $75,000, followed by a second allocation of funds in his second year based on progress. Funding comes from the NOCC program, a grant program established in 2006 with support from the Norwegian government.

Leder and collaborators intend to develop novel computational approaches to address the problem of heterogeneity in personalized cancer therapy. His research will begin by pairing mathematical models of cell population evolution with machine learning methods. By doing so, they hope to develop a computational tool to infer a tumor's heterogeneity profile from standard personalized drug screening data. Additionally, the team is aiming to develop a mathematical model of clonal evolutionary dynamics in various leukemias with the hope they will aid in predicting optimal combination or sequential therapy choices for patients with heterogeneous tumor burdens.

Leder's project will include faculty from both the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of Oslo (UiO). Co-Principal Investigators on Leder's project include Jasmine Foo (School of Mathematics, UMN), Arnoldo Frigessi (UiO), Alvaro Köhn-Luque (UiO), Kjetil Tasken (UiO) and Jorrit Enserink (UiO).