Speaker: Yang Kuang,
Arizona State University
Title:
Mathematical Models of Prostate Cancer Patients Undergoing
Intermittent Androgen Deprivation Therapy
Abstract:
Prostate cancer is commonly treated by a form of hormone therapy called androgen suppression.
This form of treatment, while successful at reducing the cancer cell population, adversely affects
quality of life and typically leads to a recurrence of the cancer in an androgen-independent form.
Intermittent androgen suppression aims to alleviate some of these adverse affects by cycling the
patient on and off treatment. Clinical studies have suggested that intermittent therapy is capable
of maintaining androgen dependence over multiple treatment cycles while increasing quality of
life during off-treatment periods. We present several mathematical models of prostate cancer
growth to study the dynamics of androgen suppression therapy and the production of prostate-
specific antigen (PSA), a clinical marker for prostate cancer. Biologically crude preliminary
models were based on the assumption of an androgen-independent (AI) cell population with
constant net growth rate. These models gave poor accuracy when fitting clinical data during
simulation. The biologically more refined models presented hypothesizes an AI population with
increased sensitivity to low levels of androgen. We also hypothesize that PSA production is heavily
dependent on androgen. The high level of accuracy in fitting clinical data with these refined models
confirms these hypotheses, which are also consistent with biological evidences.
Time: Friday, April 27, 2018, 1:30-2:30pm - JOINT CAGS and Computational and Applied Math Seminar
Place: Exploratory Hall, Room 4106
Department of Mathematical Sciences
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 3F2
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
http://math.gmu.edu/
Tel. 703-993-1460, Fax. 703-993-1491