• Question: How does your area of mathematics help you understand cancer?

    Asked by alex2 to Fiona on 23 Jan 2020. This question was also asked by freya whiting ✌.
    • Photo: Fiona Macfarlane

      Fiona Macfarlane answered on 23 Jan 2020:

      I work on computational models of cancer and the immune system. So I include cancer cells and different types of immune cells that I allow to move around/interact with each other over time. These are mainly probability based so we can put into the model how likely it is for different things to occur e.g. if a cancer cell meets an immune cell how likely is it for the cancer cell to be ‘killed’.

      Once we have a model that is biologically realistic we can test different situations e.g. if we have a treatment that increases the number of immune cells what would happen

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