Quaranta Vito, Weaver Alissa M, Cummings Peter T, Anderson Alexander R A
Department of Cancer Biology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN, USA.
Clin Chim Acta. 2005 Jul 24;357(2):173-9. doi: 10.1016/j.cccn.2005.03.023.
Cancer research has undergone radical changes in the past few years. Producing information both at the basic and clinical levels is no longer the issue. Rather, how to handle this information has become the major obstacle to progress. Intuitive approaches are no longer feasible. The next big step will be to implement mathematical modeling approaches to interrogate the enormous amount of data being produced and extract useful answers (a "top-down" approach to biology and medicine).
Quantitative simulation of clinically relevant cancer situations-based on experimentally validated mathematical modeling-provides an opportunity for the researcher, and eventually the clinician, to address data and information in the context of well-formulated questions and "what if" scenarios.
At the Vanderbilt Integrative Cancer Biology Center (VICBC), we are integrating cancer researchers, oncologists, chemical and biological engineers, computational biologists, computer modelers, theoretical and applied mathematicians, and imaging scientists, in order to implement a vision for a combined web site and computational server that will be a home for our mathematical modeling of cancer invasion. The web site (www.vanderbilt.edu/VICBC/) will serve as a portal to our code, which simulates tumor growth by calculating the dynamics of individual cancer cells (an experimental "bottom-up" approach to complement the top-down model). Eventually, cancer researchers outside of Vanderbilt will be able to initiate a simulation based on providing individual cell data through a web page. We envision placing the web site and computer cluster directly in the hands of biological researchers involved in data mining and mathematical modeling. Furthermore, the web site will also contain teaching props for a new generation of biomedical researchers fluent in both mathematics and biology. This is unconventional bioinformatics: We will be incorporating biological data and functional information into a unified community-based mathematical framework. The result will be a tool for cancer modeling that will ultimately have basic research, therapeutic and educational value.
在过去几年中，癌症研究经历了根本性的变革。在基础和临床层面生成信息已不再是问题。相反，如何处理这些信息已成为进展的主要障碍。直观的方法已不再可行。下一个重大步骤将是采用数学建模方法来审视所产生的海量数据并提取有用的答案（一种生物学和医学的“自上而下”方法）。
基于经过实验验证的数学建模对临床相关癌症情况进行定量模拟，为研究人员乃至临床医生提供了一个机会，使其能够在精心制定的问题和“如果……会怎样”的情景背景下处理数据和信息。
在范德比尔特综合癌症生物学中心（VICBC），我们正在整合癌症研究人员、肿瘤学家、化学和生物工程师、计算生物学家、计算机建模师、理论和应用数学家以及成像科学家，以实现一个联合网站和计算服务器的愿景，该网站和服务器将成为我们癌症侵袭数学建模的家园。该网站（www.vanderbilt.edu/VICBC/）将作为我们代码的入口，通过计算单个癌细胞的动态来模拟肿瘤生长（一种实验性的“自下而上”方法，以补充自上而下的模型）。最终，范德比尔特以外的癌症研究人员将能够通过网页提供单个细胞数据来启动模拟。我们设想将网站和计算机集群直接交到参与数据挖掘和数学建模的生物学研究人员手中。此外，该网站还将包含面向新一代精通数学和生物学的生物医学研究人员的教学道具。这是非常规的生物信息学：我们将把生物数据和功能信息纳入一个基于社区的统一数学框架。结果将是一个具有癌症建模功能的工具，最终具有基础研究、治疗和教育价值。
