Using Scaling Laws to Predict the Response of Resistant Microbes and Cancer Cells to Drug Cocktails
Event details
| Date | 05.05.2015 |
| Hour | 10:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Philippe Cluzel, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (USA) |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
BIOENGINEERING SEMINAR
Abstract:
An outstanding problem in modern medicine is combating bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, and cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy treatments. While drug combinations are often used to counter resistance, therapies developed on drug-sensitive cells mostly fail when applied to resistant mutants. Here I will describe a series of experiments and theoretical arguments to show that scaling laws allow us to infer the behavior of resistant mutants from that of drug-sensitive cells. Experiments validate these scaling laws, which hold for many cell types across several domains of life. This approach was found to effectively identify potent dosage regimes for targeting resistant mutants without any prior knowledge of their specific resistance mechanisms in bacteria, yeast, and cancer cell lines.
One advantage of using frameworks based on engineering principles to predict cellular behavior is that they depend on the general systems’ properties and symmetry arguments rather than on mechanistic molecular details. Unifying approaches like this provide an opportunity to reveal the potential simplicity of cellular behaviors that are often confounding at the molecular level.
Bio:
Dr. Cluzel received his PhD in Physics from Institut Marie Curie, Paris (F), in 1996. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Physics and Molecular Biology at Princeton University (Leibler Lab) until 2000, then Assistant (2000-2007) and later (2007-2008) Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago.
Since 2008 he is Full Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts & Sciences (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology) and Center for Systems Biology, and is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Abstract:
An outstanding problem in modern medicine is combating bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, and cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy treatments. While drug combinations are often used to counter resistance, therapies developed on drug-sensitive cells mostly fail when applied to resistant mutants. Here I will describe a series of experiments and theoretical arguments to show that scaling laws allow us to infer the behavior of resistant mutants from that of drug-sensitive cells. Experiments validate these scaling laws, which hold for many cell types across several domains of life. This approach was found to effectively identify potent dosage regimes for targeting resistant mutants without any prior knowledge of their specific resistance mechanisms in bacteria, yeast, and cancer cell lines.
One advantage of using frameworks based on engineering principles to predict cellular behavior is that they depend on the general systems’ properties and symmetry arguments rather than on mechanistic molecular details. Unifying approaches like this provide an opportunity to reveal the potential simplicity of cellular behaviors that are often confounding at the molecular level.
Bio:
Dr. Cluzel received his PhD in Physics from Institut Marie Curie, Paris (F), in 1996. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Physics and Molecular Biology at Princeton University (Leibler Lab) until 2000, then Assistant (2000-2007) and later (2007-2008) Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago.
Since 2008 he is Full Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts & Sciences (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology) and Center for Systems Biology, and is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Practical information
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