Ponente
Descripción
Leukemia is a clonal disease of the hematopoietic system that leads to a wide expansion of malignant cells that are nonfunctional and cause abnormalities in blood formation. Recent experimental evidence indicates that the malignant cell population may be composed of multiple clones, maintained by cells with stem cell-like properties. Disease relapse after therapy is a common problem in leukemias. The evolution of malignant tumors can be interpreted as a process of selection of cells with properties that allow them to survive treatment and expand efficiently. Based on mathematical models of leukemia dynamics, the paper shows the impact of cell growth properties on the clonal selection process in acute leukemias before and after chemotherapy by numerically solving the corresponding system of differential equations. As the mechanism of interaction between healthy and leukemic cell lines is still under study, several competition models have been proposed. The paper is based on the assumption that autonomous leukemic clones compete with hematopoietic cells for niches in the bone marrow, leading to increased cell death due to crowding.
