Overview
- Professor Philip Maini at the University of Oxford said on Tuesday that his group has developed models of angiogenesis, oxygen delivery and cell growth and is beginning experimental validation of those models.
- The work focuses on adaptive therapy, a strategy that treats tumours as ecosystems of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cells and uses dosing that preserves sensitive cells to suppress resistant clones.
- Maini argues that computer models let researchers test many dosing and combination strategies at very low cost and identify promising approaches that would be impractical to try first in clinical trials.
- The approach is presented as promising but remains at the experimental and validation stage and is not yet an established clinical tool for patients.
- Maini leads Oxford’s Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, his prior collaborations with clinicians and biologists have informed combination-therapy design, and the next steps to watch are the outcomes of laboratory validations that could guide future clinical trials.