The 2nd Annual Workshop on Cancer Systems Biology Tumor Metronomics: Timing and Dose Level Dynamics July 17-20, 2012, will take place at Tufts University, Medford Campus (Boston, MA).

This workshop will address the problem of evaluating the metronomics concept from a quantitative, ’systems’ perspective. We will focus on tumor context - how do cell-cell interactions modify cancer dynamics, and how we might render our responses in quantitative terms that are testable, and most importantly, predictive. More specifically, the workshop will try to address the problem of chemotherapeutic dose and frequency from a control-theoretic standpoint, focusing on each individual response targets in turn: 1) angiogenesis 2) stem cell response 3) immune response.

Several members of the MGHI (R. Kerbel; B.Kamen, E.Pasquier, S. Benzekry, N. André) will be "instructors" for the workshop

We have attached to this post the program.

You can have additional information here

A report of the meeting has been published in Cancer Res. 2013 Mar 14. [Epub ahead of print] by Hahnfeldt P, Hlatky L, Klement GL. We have pasted the abstract below Abstract

Metronomic chemotherapy - the delivery of doses in a low, regular manner so as to avoid toxic side effects - was introduced over 12 years ago in the face of substantial clinical and pre-clinical evidence supporting its tumor-suppressive capability. It constituted a marked departure from the classic maximum tolerated dose (MTD) strategy which, given its goal of rapid eradication, uses dosing sufficiently intense to require rest periods between cycles to limit toxicity. Even so, up-front tumor eradication is frequently not achieved with MTD, whereupon a de facto goal of longer-term tumor control is often pursued. As metronomic dosing has demonstrated tumor control capability, even for cancers that have become resistant to the same drug delivered under MTD, the question arises whether it may be a preferable alternative dosing approach from the outset. To date, however, our knowledge of the coupled dynamics underlying metronomic dosing is neither sufficiently well developed, nor widely enough disseminated, to establish its actual potential. Meeting organizers thus felt the time was right, armed with new quantitative approaches, to call a workshop on "Tumor Metronomics: Timing and Dose Level Dynamics" for the oncology community to gain a deeper, systems-level appreciation of the metronomics concept. The Workshop proved to be a forum where experts from the clinical, biological, mathematical and computational realms could work together to clarify the principles and underpinnings of metronomics. Among other things, the need for significant shifts in thinking regarding endpoints to be used as clinical standards of therapeutic progress was recognized.