I do not normally talk about reports on my work on other journals. The reason I am making an exception today is that finally, there’s a report on work I am directly involved in a journal. Last week, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published this article by Mike Martin in which (despite the slightly misleading title implying that we study invasive metablism) together with former colleagues in Dresden we use game theory to study the emergence of invasive types. The results have been reported in a couple of papers here and here.

The idea is that game theory, a mathematical tool whose first use was to study sociological problems, can be used to study the evolutionary dynamics of populations made of individuals with different behaviours (phenotypes biologically or strategies in game theoretical parlance). In an evolving tumour, the different phenotypes represent the different strategies that tumour cells can use to survive, proliferate and in general adapt to a potentially quite dynamic environment. The potential to survive and thrive of any given cell depends on its strategy as much as on the strategies of other cells in the tumour. That is something that GT is well suited to study.

With this approach we decided to investigate how cells capable of motility would fare in two different situations. In the first one those motile cells compete only with cells that just proliferate beyond what you would expect on a normal healthy tissue. On the second one, we considered a tumour in which the invasive cells coexist not only with the proliferative type but also with a type of cell commonly found in many tumours that has what is known as a glycolytic metabolism (more on that here although basically what it means is that they have a less efficient metabolism that, as a side product, produces acid that can potentially harm other cells in their neighbourhood). What we found is that motility-capable cells constitute a bigger part in tumours that also contain glycolytic cells than in those that are exclusively made of proliferative cell. The results also suggest that invasiveness, which requires motility, is more likely to occur in circumstances that favour the emergence of cells with a glycolytic metabolism, which means, when the tumour had faced (at least in some regions of it) lack of oxygen.

Martin’s article describes the research in terms that should be accessible to the layman. It interviews some of the authors (I am still puzzled that there’s no input from Matthias Simon, the only one among us that can be called an MD and that did a wonderful job framing the rather abstract research in the context of gliomas) as well as very relevant people such as Moffitt’s Gatenby and Anderson, Nevada Cancer Institute’s oncologist Manno and game theoretician Jim Miller.

Martin, M. (2009). Can Game Theory Explain Invasive Tumor Metabolism? JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 101 (4), 220-222 DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djp013