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Understanding How Cancer Adapts To Stress And Therapy Using Evolutionary Game Theory, Mariyah Pressley
Understanding How Cancer Adapts To Stress And Therapy Using Evolutionary Game Theory, Mariyah Pressley
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Adaptive responses in cancer promote disease initiation, progression, and resistance to treatment. Understanding the underlying evolutionary dynamics behind these adaptive responses is crucial for developing effective therapeutic strategies. Evolutionary game theory (EGT) has proven a useful tool in analyzing how different cellular behaviors and evolutionary forces shape the dynamics of tumor growth, response to therapy, and the emergence of resistance. In this dissertation, we utilize EGT to understand the adaptive responses of cancer through the lens of ecology and evolution. By employing fitness-generating models and exploring various ecological contexts, we aimed to unveil critical factors influencing aggressive cell phenotypes, treatment …
Evolution Of Targeted Therapy Resistance In Eml4-Alk Positive Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer, Robert Vander Velde
Evolution Of Targeted Therapy Resistance In Eml4-Alk Positive Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer, Robert Vander Velde
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Targeted therapies have emerged as potent treatments that lead to the remission of many tumors. However, they rarely cure cancers in advanced, metastatic settings. This is due to the evolution of resistance, which in turn can be ascribed to the survival of small subpopulations of tolerant and/or resistant cells. Here we investigated the evolution of resistance to EML4-ALK inhibitors in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and demonstrated that resistance evolves gradually, from unique pre-treatment sub-populations, as multiple resistance mechanisms accumulate in a Darwinian fashion. Despite accumulating multiple changes, cells evolved, in parallel, toward similar inhibitor specific phenotypes. Evolving cells have …
The Distribution In Native Populations From Mexico And Central America Of The C677t Variant In The Mthfr Gene, Lucio A. Reyes
The Distribution In Native Populations From Mexico And Central America Of The C677t Variant In The Mthfr Gene, Lucio A. Reyes
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Objectives: To explore evolutionary hypotheses for the high frequencies of a substitution in the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene, in Mexican and Central American Indigenous populations.
Materials and methods: We obtained allele frequencies for the C677T variant in the MTHFR gene and ecological information for 37 indigenous samples from Mexico and Central America. We calculated Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium and computed Fst statistics. We computed correlations between the samples' allele frequencies and ecological and geochemical variables.
Results: Many of the samples have extremely high frequencies of the T allele (q̄ = 0.62, median = 0.66). In this region, the frequency of the T …