In 2020 I served on the organizing committee for the Cancer Adaptive Therapy modeling (CATMo) workshop. The conference was held from Dec. 7th to 10th, 2020, just three hours a day (9-12 am, US Eastern time, 3-6 pm European continental time), in order to facilitate attendance by both Europeans and American researchers.

Adaptive Cancer Therapy

Treatment resistance in cancer therapy remains an overarching challenge across all types of cancer and modes of treatment including targeted therapy, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy. Despite the ubiquity of the evolution of resistance, the “more is better'' paradigm prevails in standard of care approaches. Over the past decade, a small group of oncologists in collaboration with evolutionary and experimental biologists have proposed an adaptive approach to cancer treatment.

Mathematical Modeling

The goal of the workshop was to gather the main groups that have been recently trying to model adaptive therapy using mathematics, or whose work could help to do so, in order to build a community, understand the state of the art, exchange on the directions the field should take, and foster collaborations. On top of regular talks and a poster session, time will be allowed for discussions. Both proponents of and opponents to adaptive therapy attended with fruitful discussion.

Recorded talks

A playlist of all talks at CATMo2020 can be found at catmo2020.org/#watch.