Description:

TITLE: Mathematical Modeling and Optimal Fractionationated Irradiation for Proneural Glioblastomas

PRESENTER: Kevin Leder, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering The University of Minnesota 

Dr. Leder is an assistant professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Minnesota. He is interested in stochastic process models of cancer evolution, and the use of these models to investigate important biological questions regarding the initiation, progression and treatment of cancer. In addition he is interested in the study of rare events in stochastic systems. Previously, he was a postdoc at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia, and received his PhD in 2008 from the Department of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and majored in Applied Math.

Abstract: Glioblastomas (GBM) are the most common and malignant primary tumors of the brain and are commonly treated with radiation therapy. Despite modest advances in chemotherapy and radiation, survival has changed very little over the last 50 years. Radiation therapy is one of the pillars of adjuvant therapy for GBM but despite treatment, recurrence inevitably occurs. Here we develop a mathematical model for the tumor response to radiation that takes into account the plasticity of the hierarchical structure of the tumor population. Based on this mathematical model we develop an optimized radiation delivery schedule. This strategy was validated to be superior in mice and nearly doubled the efficacy of each Gray of radiation administered. Time permitting I will also discuss recent extensions of this work that consider the impact of including normal tissue toxicity constraints. This is based on joint work with Hamidreza Badri, Ken Pitter, Eric Holland, and Franziska Michor.