Rethinking Combination Cancer Therapy with Experiments, Computation, and Clinical Data

BIOENGINEERING SEMINAR

Abstract:
Developing optimal drug combinations is one of the central challenges of cancer treatment research: drug combinations are used to treat most types of cancer, and are almost exclusively responsible for cures of advanced cancers. However, historically successful combination therapies were developed empirically, and the mechanistic basis for their efficacy has been largely speculative. I will present studies of clinically successful combination therapies that identify the control of between-tumor and within-tumor heterogeneity by independently active drugs as critical contributors to the efficacy of drug combinations in human patients. Mathematical descriptions of heterogeneity in cellular or patient populations, and experimental measurements of how drug combinations address heterogeneity, lead to accurate predictions of clinical trial results across many types of cancer and types of therapies, including curative chemotherapy regimens and recent immunotherapies. These results have broad significance for the treatment of cancers, for the interpretation of clinical trials, and point to new opportunities to use combination therapies with greater precision.

Bio:
Adam Palmer is  a postdoctoral fellow with Peter K. Sorger at Harvard Medical School's Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology and Department of Systems Biology. He applies experiments and computation to understand and to develop combination cancer therapies, with particular focus on the origins and therapeutic consequences of cell-to-cell and patient-to-patient heterogeneity in cancers.
He completed his Ph.D in Systems Biology at Harvard University with Roy Kishony, researching the relationships between mechanisms of drug action and the evolution of drug resistance. He got his  B.Sc (Honours) at The University of Adelaide, Australia, where he completed majors in Biochemistry, Chemistry, and Physics, and researched gene regulation by protein traffic on DNA.

Zoom link for attending remotely: https://epfl.zoom.us/j/229779872