Understanding Cancer from a Systems Biology Point of View

1. Introduction 2. Tumor dormancy 3. Cancer immunoediting: a process driven by metabolic competition as a predator-prey-shared resource type model 4. Escape from tumor dormancy and time to angiogenic switch as mitigated by tumor- induced stimulation of stroma 5. Angiogenesis regulators as a possible key to accelerated growth of secondary tumors following primary tumor resection 6. A combination of immune checkpoint inhibition with metronomic chemotherapy as a way of targeting therapy-resistant cancer cells 7. Summary and conclusions

Irina Kareva received her PhD in Applied Mathematics for Life and Social Sciences in 2012 and was a Postdoctoral fellow at Center of Cancer Systems Biology (Tufts University School of Medicine). She has been working in mathematical modelling of cancer as an evolving ecological system throughout her career, focusing on understanding cancer as a complex systemic disease rather than just disease of the genes. Several of the theoretical constructs that she proposed have been subsequently independently verified experimentally. Dr. Kareva strives to incorporate knowledge from molecular biology, evolutionary ecology, mathematics, game theory and even palaeontology to find approaches to understand and treat cancer to achieve long term positive outcomes. Dr. Kareva published a book entitled Niche Construction, Sustainability, and Evolutionary Ecology of Cancer (Scholar's Press, 2015) and has published in several important journals such as Ecology and Evolution of Cancer, Journal of Theoretical Biology and Cancer Research. She was Distinguished Lecturer at Rochester Institute of Technology (2016) and gave a TED talk (2017) on using mathematical modeling to better ask biological questions.