Nonlinear Biomedical Physics Blog
Without a theoretical basis experimentalists are wandering around blindly in the dark. Unfortunately, this is often the situation in the medical sciences. That is why interdisciplinary research is so important.
The recent article: ‘Cancer as a dynamical phase transition’ by Davies, Demetrius, and Tuszynski published in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling is an excellent example of such research. In their conclusions the authors write: “This new perspective points up certain features that are often ignored in therapeutic approaches. In terms of therapeutic insights that may be gained from the application of the concept of a phase transition, the long-range correlation effect, which is a characteristic property of systems undergoing phase transitions suggests that a truly successful therapy would require a global change of conditions disfavoring the cancer phenotype and not simply a local excision or destruction of cancer cells in their micro-environment. The thermodynamic model of cancer developed in this paper suggests a shift in therapeutic strategy away from radiation and chemotherapy towards novel types of interventions that still need to be identified and tested.”
We fully agree with the authors that “application [of the idea of phase transitions] to the initiation and progression of cancer at a cellular level is novel, and offers a promising approach to the understanding, prevention and control of cancer.” While undergoing a phase transition properties of the system change, not just nonlinearly, but they ‘jump’ in a non-continuous way. Discussing the properties of cancer cells from a perspective based on an analogy with phase transitions in physical systems is really inspiring.
Posted by Wlodzimierz Klonowski at 16:02 Comments (0)