I have recently arrived from a meeting in Bethesda. Bethesda is a nice town, near Washington DC and this was an exciting time to be in Washington…if only if it hadn’t be so improbably cold!
In any case, this meeting brought together some of the luminaries in the field of cancer biology and, unusually for the meetings I attend, mathematical modellers were a wee minority of the attendants. This is far from being bad news as it is always easier to learn once you step out of your comfort zone.
During the poster session I presented some work in which the role of TGF-Beta in prostate tumour progression is studied. Although we have assumed that the role of TGF-Beta could be critical for the survival of the tumour I found out that this is not something on which everybody in the field agrees on. Turns out that several different pieces of research point towards apparently conflicting directions.
This is precisely one of the reasons that show how theoretical models can be useful. Say that we have taken one or more of these controversial assumptions, say that our experimental friends at Vanderbilt can’t see in their experiments what happily goes on in the screen of my computer: then we can start questioning our assumption. On the other hand, say that theory and experiments match: then we can tell other people to question their assumptions. In either case a most reasonable way of help to settle down the discussion.
It’s true, theoretical models can be useful for deriving the consequences of starting assumptions, that can then be compared to experimental results. Models are also really useful for figuring out which variables in an experiment actually matter (make a difference to the results), and which ones don’t.
Hi Viviane. You are quite right. The aim of the post was not to go through all the potential benefits that mathematical biology can bring to biological/medical research but to illustrate one particular example. Of course models can also be used to help find what parts of a biological system are important or not as you pointed out. For instance, it would be easy to change the model I presented to see if removing TGF-Beta entirely from the system would have a big effect or not, and whether experimental results will prove or disprove that, this should be something for which the model could provide a lot of guidance.