## Evolutionary dynamics of acid and VEGF production in tumours

Today was my presentation day at ECMTB/SMB 2016. I spoke in David Basanta’s mini-symposium on the games that cancer cells play and postered during the poster session. The mini-symposium started with a brief intro from David, and had 25 minute talks from Jacob Scott, myself, Alexander Anderson, and John Nagy. David, Jake, Sandy, and John are some of the top mathematical oncologists and really drew a crowd, so I felt privileged at the opportunity to address that crowd. It was also just fun to see lots of familiar faces in the same place.

A crowded room by the end of Sandy’s presentation.

My talk was focused on two projects. The first part was the advertised “Evolutionary dynamics of acid and VEGF production in tumours” that I’ve been working on with Robert Vander Velde, Jake, and David. The second part — and my poster later in the day — was the additional “(+ measuring games in non-small cell lung cancer)” based on work with Jeffrey Peacock, Andriy Marusyk, and Jake. You can download my slides here (also the poster), but they are probably hard to make sense of without a presentation. I had intended to have a preprint out on this prior to today, but it will follow next week instead. Since there are already many blog posts about the double goods project on TheEGG, in this post I will organize them into a single annotated linkdex.

## Modeling influenza at ECMTB/SMB 2016

This week, I am at the University of Nottingham for the joint meeting of the Society of Mathematical Biology and the European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology — ECMTB/SMB 2016. It is a huge meeting, with over 800 delegates in attendance, 308 half-hour mini-symposium talks, 264 twenty-minute contributed talks, 190 posters, 7 prize talks, 7 plenary talks, and 1 public lecture. With seventeen to eighteen sessions running in parallel, it is impossible to see more than a tiny fraction of the content. And impossible for me to give you a comprehensive account of the event. However, I did want to share some moments from this week. If you are at ECMTB and want to share some of your highlights for TheEGG then let me know, and we can have you guest post.

I did not come to Nottingham alone. Above is a photo of current/recent Moffitteers that made their way to the meeting this year.

On the train ride to Nottingham, I needed to hear some success stories of mathematical biology. One of the ones that Dan Nichol volunteered was the SIR-model for controlling the spread of infectious disease. This is a simple system of ODEs with three compartments corresponding to the infection status of individuals in the population: susceptible (S), infectious (I), recovered (R). It is given by the following equations

\begin{aligned} \dot{S} & = - \beta I S \\ \dot{I} & = \beta I S - \gamma I \\ \dot{R} & = \gamma I, \end{aligned}

where $\beta$ and $\gamma$ are usually taken to be constants dependent on the pathogen, and the total number of individuals $N = S + I + R$ is an invariant of the dynamics.

As the replicator dynamics are to evolutionary game theory, the SIR-model is to epidemiology. And it was where Julia Gog opened the conference with her plenary on the challenges of modeling infectious disease. In this post, I will briefly touch on her extensions of the SIR-model and how she used it to look at the 2009 swine flu outbreak in the US.