UAlberta Math Biology Seminar: Morgan Craig

A significant cause of cancer treatment failure is both inter- and intra-patient heterogeneity. Understanding genetic heterogeneity prior to cancer diagnosis and how to deal with cellular heterogeneity during treatment is critical to improving patient outcomes. In this talk, I will discuss the approaches we have developed to model genetic and cell cycle variability and their applications to clonal hematopoiesis, during which hematopoietic stem cells or other early blood cell progenitors disproportionally contribute to a genetically distinct subpopulation of cells in the blood, and improving oncolytic virotherapy, a type of immunotherapy that uses genetically modified viruses to infect cancer cells.Our results broaden the theory of species coexistence in heterogeneous space and provide empirical confirmation of the mathematical predictions.