How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?
The Joy of Why
Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
4.9 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another potential weapon for defeating tumors: statistics and mathematical models that can optimize the selection, combination or timing of treatment. Building and feeding these models requires accounting for the complexity of the body, and recognizing that cancer cells are constantly evolving.
In this episode, host Steven Strogatz hears from Franziska Michor, a computational biologist, about how our understanding of evolutionary dynamics is being used to devise new anticancer therapies.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Cancer has touched most of us at some point in our lives, whether it's friends, |
| 0:09.0 | family, or ourselves. |
| 0:12.0 | It's the second leading cause of death in the U.S. today. |
| 0:15.0 | And though the risk of dying from cancer has steadily declined for decades, the number of |
| 0:20.0 | cases is on the rise, with 2 million |
| 0:22.7 | new cancer diagnoses expected by the end of 2024. |
| 0:26.7 | These numbers and the grief and havoc they cause can make cancer seem almost invincible. |
| 0:33.4 | But the best way to fight back is to understand this disease at its most fundamental, molecular level, |
| 0:39.3 | and to use math to our advantage. |
| 0:42.3 | I'm Steve Strogetz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine, where I take turns at the mic with my co-host, Jan 11, exploring some of the biggest questions in math and science today. |
| 1:06.1 | In this episode, we're joined by biologist and mathematician Francisco Michor to ask how cancer |
| 1:12.7 | has evolved into such a formidable disease and how machine learning and new statistical |
| 1:18.0 | models can give us the upper hand. |
| 1:21.0 | Francisco is a professor of computational biology at Harvard University and the director |
| 1:26.1 | of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Evolution. |
| 1:30.5 | She studies the evolutionary dynamics of cancer initiation, progression, response to therapy, |
| 1:37.1 | and the emergence of resistance. |
| 1:43.9 | Welcome to the show, Francisco. We're really happy to have you here. |
| 1:47.3 | Thank you, Steve. I'm so excited to be here. |
| 1:49.7 | Oh, that's great. Well, let us begin with the basics. What is cancer? Could you explain to us how are cancerous cells different from healthy ones? What's happening on a molecular |
| 2:02.0 | level? Yeah. Cancer cells are cells that proliferate out of control in ways and in places |
| 2:08.6 | where they shouldn't be growing. So if you can imagine the structure and architecture of a normal |
... |
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