Crunching cancer with numbers

[Randy]

An article in The New Scientist.

Here's the link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727680.400-crunching-cancer-with-numbers.html?page=1

"Within five years, the team hopes to have a single, all-embracing
model of mouse lymphoma that fits the data as convincingly, and has as
much predictive power, as a theory of gravity or electric fields. If
they can pull that off, transferring the insights to humans will be
the next challenge. The dream is to produce a model that, by plugging
in key parameters - sex, blood pressure, genetic sequences and the
like - could predict an individual's response to various combinations
of cancer therapies. "We could run a simulation for each patient, and
design a complex treatment specific to that patient," says Hillis.
"Maybe we would use some radiation for while, then heat them up, then
change the glucose level in their blood."

"Not everybody is convinced by the new approach. Many biologists doubt
the human body will give up its mysteries under crude mathematical
scrutiny. Such an approach implies a degree of simplification and loss
of detail that could never do justice to the complexities of a dynamic
and variable system, they argue. "You can come up with computational
models, and they may be very interesting, but the question is whether
they reflect reality," says Leonard Augenlicht, an oncologist at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York."