Predator Prey Adaptive Control for Exosome based Molecular Communications Glioblastoma Treatment Presented at IEEE ICC 2021
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Walton Institute’s Caio Fonseca recently presented at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The ICC is one of the IEEE Communications Society’s two flagship conferences dedicated to driving innovation in communication. The Theme of the ICC 2021 Conference was “CONNECTIVITY – SECURITY – PRIVACY”.
Fonseca’s presentation focused on his paper “Predator Prey Adaptive Control for Exosome based Molecular Communications Glioblastoma Treatment.”
Glioblastoma Multiform is the most aggressive form of cancer in the brain. Patients diagnosed with this cancer do not have a long life expectancy. Fonseca’s research has the objective of shedding light into the battle against this form of tumor by describing it from another perspective and understanding it as a prey that needs to be hunted. Comprehending how the tumor grows, behaves and how we can target it is fundamental. The ultimate goal then is to use novel theranostics methods such as exosomes to target this tumor and hopefully completely eradicate it.
In the natural world, or in other words, the animal world, there are dynamical systems which involve interactions between animals of different species. An example of such dynamics is the interactions between a predator and a prey, for example a fox and a rabbit. These interactions can be described and modelled mathematically so that we can understand how much of the population of each species will increase or decrease over time, and these models are called Predator-Prey or Lotka-Volterra models. In his paper, Fonseca modelled the interactions between exosomes which are transporters of therapeutic molecules and glioblastoma tumour cells as a Predator-Prey system; where the exosomes play the role of the predator and the tumour cells play the role of the prey.
The paper aims to mathematically describe and model the interactions between induced Neural Stem Cells derived exosomes and the Glioblastoma Multiform; an aggressive form of tumour in the brain, as Predator-Prey interactions. Fonseca introduced a control system, with the objective of controlling these interactions aiming to completely eradicate the tumour.
Link for the original Post: https://waltoninstitute.ie/news-and-events/news/predator-prey-adaptive-control-for-exosome-based-molecular-communications-glioblastoma-treatment
