Experimental and comparative oncology: zebrafish, dogs, elephants

One of the exciting things about mathematical oncology is that thinking about cancer often forces me to leave my comfortable arm-chair and look at some actually data. No matter how much I advocate for the merits of heuristic modeling, when it comes to cancer, data-agnostic models take second stage to data-rich modeling. This close relationship between theory and experiment is of great importance to the health of a discipline, and the MBI Workshop on the Ecology and Evolution of Cancer highlights the health of mathematical oncology: mathematicians are sitting side-by-side with clinicians, biologists with computer scientists, and physicists next to ecologists. This means that the most novel talks for me have been the ones highlighting the great variety of experiments that are being done and how they inform theory.In this post I want to highlight some of these talks, with a particular emphasis on using the study of cancer in non-humans to inform human medicine.