Engineering Improvements in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy: Experimental and Computational Models

Tremendous advances in biology, including but not limited to high-profile areas such as genomics and stem cells, have provided new hope for improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Engineers have much to offer in this endeavor, in areas such as mathematical modeling (at levels ranging from whole body pharmacokinetic down to cellular and molecular dynamics), transport in tumors, development of novel drug delivery strategies and data mining. This session will highlight chemical and bio-engineering methodologies for bringing these hopes closer to practice. Studies involving modeling, experiments or both are welcome. This session will particularly highlight experimental and computational models that capture the effects of multidrug resistance, cell metabolism, cell cycle population distributions and dense three-dimensional tissue on the efficacy of cancer therapy.