Populational adaptive evolution, chemotherapeutic resistance and multiple anti-cancer therapies
Resistance to chemotherapies, particularly to anticancer treatments, is an increasing medical concern. Among the many mechanisms at work in cancers, one of the most important is the selection of tumor cells expressing resistance genes or phenotypes. Motivated by the theory of mutation-selection in adaptive evolution, we propose a model based on a continuous variable that represents the expression level of a resistance gene (or genes, yielding a phenotype) influencing in healthy and tumor cells birth/death...