“Kristin Swanson, Ph.D., UW Medicine Pathology Research Associate Professor, recently received a (5 year, $1.9 Million NIH) R01 Grant, Novel Tools for Evaluation and Prediction of Radiotherapy Response in Individual Glioma Patients. For more information on the award and Dr. Swanson’s research, please read the grant abstract below and visit Dr. Swanson’s lab website.
Gliomas are uniformly fatal primary brain tumors, the diagnosis of which has been greatly impacted by improvements in medical imaging techniques over the last several decades. However, a significant gap remains between the obvious goal of more effective therapy and the present understanding of the dynamics of the tumor’s proliferation and invasion in humans in vivo….”
The Right Equation: Mathematicians Work To Predict Tumor Growth
A Journal of the National Cancer Institute article featuring the Swanson Lab as one of the few labs applying mathematical modeling tools to patient-specific data.
“Statistics is well accepted as a tool in designing clinical trials and in analyzing clinical data. Similarly, mathematical theory has found applications in oncology; the current use of dose-dense chemotherapy, for example, arose from mathematical considerations. (See News, Vol. 95, No. 4, p. 254.)
But the goal of the new mathematical oncology is to be able to model tumors so well that researchers can begin to use computers to guide treatment on an individual basis. Those working in the field say that recent successes are beginning to excite a new interest among physicians in applying math to cancer…”