ECE Researchers Win Poster Competition Prize at the Applied BioMath Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Summit

ECE PhD student, Vahideh Vakil, received the second place award for her poster "Dose Optimization for Drug-resistant Cancer Treatment", which was presented at the 2021  Applied BioMath Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Summit. She is working under the supervision of Professor Wade Trappe on mathematical modeling and networking techniques applied to systems pharmacology and systems biology, with a goal of developing mathematical techniques to improve medical treatments for human diseases. The emergence of drug resistance is one of the primary barriers to the success of cancer treatment strategies. In this poster presentation, a Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) approach was presented for designing a multi-drug dosage strategy to combat drug resistance and minimize the tumor size in an aggressive treatment, followed by a dosage design that controls the tumor burden and postpones the rise of resistance in a containment treatment strategy. Given the restrictions in time and resources required to test all possible treatment scenarios in vitro, it is essential to explore a cancer’s response to the treatment in silico, ultimately allowing one to better predict the outcome of the treatment toward a personalized treatment. The proposed QSP approach can be applied to find the optimal dosage design to eradicate/control the tumor progression, given any clinical setting, pharmacological parameters and personalized for an individual patient’s needs.

Congratulations to Vahideh and Wade!