Spotlight on cancer informatics.

Q: What would you say is the primary focus of your research effort (how do you refer to your ‘subarea’)?

Q What would you say is the primary focus of your research effort (how do you refer to your 'subarea')?
A In Silico Oncology Q What do you consider to be the most signifi cant open questions and research challenges in cancer informatics?
A I think that understanding and effectively modeling the dynamics of cancer and affected normal tissues at all biocomplexity levels by using any effi cient combination of mathematical and computer modeling approaches (discrete, continuous, deterministic, stochastic, analytical, numerical, algorithmic etc.) is the fundamental open question and research challenge in cancer informatics. Obviously this is a long term target which presupposes success in understanding and modeling every single critical mechanism involved in cancer and affected normal tissue development and treatment response, as well as the subsequent integration of all those modeling modules.
As the demands of such an endeavor are tremendous, I think that a parallelism with the history of Newtonian physics might serve as a source of guidance, inspiration and courage. It has been suggested that cancer epitomizes the entire biology. In this context I think that a title like: "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Pars II, Materia Vivens" (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Part II, Living Matter) might to some extent describe the collaborative efforts on a worldwide scale to apply the analytical way of thinking on the description of natural phenomena (mechanisms) involving living matter and especially on those related to cancer. Obviously stochasticity would be a key player in such an approach. A thorough, quantitative, clinically validated and exploitable understanding of such multi-scale phenomena is expected to dramatically accelerate the achievement of cancer cure on a patient individualized basis through treatment optimization in silico (on the computer). Such an expectation seems to be compatible with the US National Cancer Program's goal of eliminating the suffering and death due to cancer by 2015.
Q What do you consider to be the most signifi cant developments as a result of research cancer informatics?
A Radiotherapy treatment planning is perhaps the fi rst large scale achievement of cancer informatics.
Recent achievements include the design of cancer drugs, the simulation and elucidation of specifi c tumor growth mechanisms, the modeling of molecular networks involved in cancer etc. Q Tell us about your collaborative research. How much of your effort is typically focused on helping to provide cancer researchers with clinically signifi cant results?
A I would say that roughly 40% of my effort is focused on helping providing cancer researchers with clinically signifi cant results. Within this frame a careful use of clinical data stemming from clinical trials as well as directly form collaborating hospitals (imaging, histopathological, molecular, historical data) is being made in order to validate, adapt and optimize the simulation models that my group has been developing. Q What do you consider to be the most pressing challenges or barriers to success in cancer research?
A I consider lack of effi cient coordination of the experimental, theoretical and computational research work on a worldwide scale is one of the most pressing barriers to cancer research. Hopefully recent efforts based on grid and other forms of information technology seem to considerably alleviate this problem, but it won't be enough. IT is important; however, equal funding and effort should be put into the development of suffi ciently fine-grained analytical informatics, supporting research on algorithms for cancer modeling, including computationally intensive statistical analyses, understanding information fl ow about cancer and cancer care as multi-scale phenomena. Past funding priorities in basic research, and now in informatics, have actually starved the development of new insight from mathematics, intensive computing, and statistics, and what we do with the integrated data is, in many ways, fundamentally much more important that how we store and transfer it. The theory in these models must be made to refl ect the complexity of cancer, and cancer research and clinical practice must be made ready to be informed by these models. This is especially challenging because we must avoid building IT systems that limit discovery and exploration by hard-wiring a particular knowledge based or paradigm. Ideally, the IT infrastructure would be built with a deep understanding of the intrinsic complexity and multiscale nature of the biological processes involved in cancer occurrence and progression. In other words apart from a sophisticated infrastructure constructor, informatics is called to act -to a certain extent-as the "successor" of classical mathematics i.e. as the descriptive language of hypercomplex natural phenomena such as cancer. A I think that researchers involved in both cancer research and informatics need updated books on 1) general biology including biochemistry 2) pharmacology 3) radiobiology 4) cancer pathology, biology and treatment 5) algorithms and complexity A I think that the historical fi gures that have most infl uenced my way of thinking about research are the following: 1) Aristotle, the founder of the science ofbiology, through his extensive zoological descriptions and his detailed and mostly objective observations on the biological phenomena 2) Isaac Newton, the founder of classical physics, through his parsimonious (laconic) mathematical description of the basic natural phenomena 3) Gregor Johann Mendel, the founder of genetics, through his insistent experimentation and the ingenious phenomenological interpretation of his experimental data; still more, through his determination to carry on research despite the unusually unfavorable circumstances he faced during his life. A 1) Development of software simulating tumor growth and response to radiotherapeutic schemes 2) Development of software simulating tumor growth and response to chemotherapeutic schemes 3) Development of software simulating the response of normal tissues to radiation therapy (and prospectively chemotherapy). A I would promote 1) deeper understanding of the problems to be addressed before informatics tools are applied or developed 2) emphasis on the application driven informatics development 3) tighter collaboration between all participants involved in informatics research and development. A I think that a new era in cancer research is dawning. Cancer Informatics is undoubtedly a key player. New challenges include the development of highly specialized algorithms for the simulation of dynamic phenomena at all levels of biocomplexity, hyper-high performance hardware, promotion of the open access policy etc. Furthermore, the immense necessities of cancer research are expected to greatly contribute to the progress of informatics itself. By analogy with the unparalleled progress achieved in mathematical analysis as a result of the needs of classical physics it would be quite reasonable to predict a tremendous impact on the development of informatics by the needs of biology and cancer science, especially if funding priorities are aligned to promote such a synthesis.