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| Cancer is a disease driven by Darwinian evolution which means that understanding how tumour cells interact with each other, with normal cells and with the physical microenvironment is key if we want to understand disease progression. These cell-cell and cell-microenvironment interactions constitute the natural selection of the somatic evolution characterising carcinogenesis. In this talk I will introduce simple but also more complex approaches to model this where we consider prostate cancer metastases to the bone as new species invading an existing ecosystem. Tools like Evolutionary Game Theory allow us to quickly explore interaction-based cancer evolutionary dynamics whereas agent-based models allow us to obtain more detailed and quantiative predictions that would allow us to have a better insight about the best therapeutic options for a given patient. While mathematical models should strive to be as simple as possible, modelling metastases requires us to embrace the complexity of all the interactions that characterise homeostasis and homeostasis disruption in the bone. |
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