More than one in three people in
the UK are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Researchers Abertay, St
Andrews, Edinburgh and Dundee Universities combine biomedical science, complex
computing and interactive animations to create better models for predicting
cancer and drug behaviour. Their work creates interactive models that show cell
signalling pathways and biomolecular species levels, allowing the impact of
changing of doses of different combinations of drugs to be predicted.
The interactive models function
like a living map, letting mathematicians and biologists work more closely
together. Any drug interventions show system-scale, knock-on effects – just as
if a line was closed on the London Tube, re-routing passengers on to other
lines. By visualising what cancer cell pathways look like, and predicting how
they interact with different drugs in real time, they hope to improve this area
of crucial scientific research. The next step is to create an interactive tool
to simulate 1 million biologically plausible cells and its evolution over a six
month period.
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