Toxicity Management in CAR T cell therapy for B-ALL: Mathematical modelling as a new avenue for improvement.

Shalla Hanson, David Robert Grimes, Jake P. Taylor-King, Benedikt Bauer, Pravnam I. Warman, Ziv Frankenstein, Artem Kaznatcheev, Michael J. Bonassar, Vincent L. Cannataro, Zeinab Y. Motawe, Ernesto A. B. F. Lima, Sungjune Kim, Marco L. Davila, Arturo Araujo

Abstract

Advances in genetic engineering have made it possible to reprogram individual immune cells to express receptors that recognise markers on tumour cell surfaces. The process of re-engineering T cell lymphocytes to express Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs), and then re-infusing the CAR-modified T cells into patients to treat various cancers is referred to as CAR T cell therapy. This therapy is being explored in clinical trials - most prominently for B Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (B-ALL), a common B cell malignancy, for which CAR T cell therapy has led to remission in up to 90% of patients. Despite this extraordinary response rate, however, potentially fatal inflammatory side effects occur in up to 10% of patients who have positive responses. Further, approximately 50% of patients who initially respond to the therapy relapse. Significant improvement is thus necessary before the therapy can be made widely available for use in the clinic. To inform future development, we develop a mathematical model to explore interactions between CAR T cells, inflammatory toxicity, and individual patients' tumour burdens in silico. This paper outlines the underlying system of coupled ordinary differential equations designed based on well-known immunological principles and widely accepted views on the mechanism of toxicity development in CAR T cell therapy for B-ALL - and reports in silico outcomes in relationship to standard and recently conjectured predictors of toxicity in a heterogeneous, randomly generated patient population. Our initial results and analyses are consistent with and connect immunological mechanisms to the clinically observed, counterintuitive hypothesis that initial tumour burden is a stronger predictor of toxicity than is the dose of CAR T cells administered to patients. We outline how the mechanism of action in CAR T cell therapy can give rise to such non-standard trends in toxicity development, and demonstrate the utility of mathematical modelling in understanding the relationship between predictors of toxicity, mechanism of action, and patient outcomes.

Link:http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/22/049908

Universal asymptotic clone size distribution for general population growth

Michael D. Nicholson, Tibor Antal

Deterministically growing (wild-type) populations which seed stochastically developing mutant clones have found an expanding number of applications from microbial populations to cancer. The special case of exponential wild-type population growth, usually termed as the Luria-Delbruck or Lea-Coulson model, is often assumed but seldom realistic. In this article we generalise the model to different types of wild-type population growth, with mutants evolving as a birth-death branching process. Our focus is on the size distribution of clones after some time, which can be mapped to the total number of mutants. Exact expressions are derived for exponential, power-law and logistic population growth. We prove that the large time limit of the clone size distribution has a general two-parameter form for a large class of population growth. The large time clone size distribution always has a power-law tail, and for subexponential wild-type growth the probability of a given clone size is inversely proportional to the clone size. We support our results by analysing a data-set on tumour metastasis sizes, and we find that a power-law tail is more likely than an exponential one, in agreement with our predictions.

Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04936#

Why one-size-fits-all vaso-modulatory interventions fail to control glioma invasion: in silico insights

Why one-size-fits-all vaso-modulatory interventions fail to control glioma invasion: in silica insights

J. C. L. Alfonso, A. Kohn-Luque, T. Stylianopoulos, F. Feuerhake, A. Deutsch, H. Hatzikirou

There is an ongoing debate on the therapeutic potential of vaso-modulatory interventions against glioma invasion. Prominent vasculature-targeting therapies involve functional tumour-associated blood vessel deterioration and normalisation. The former aims at tumour infarction and nutrient deprivation medi- ated by vascular targeting agents that induce occlusion/collapse of tumour blood vessels. In contrast, the therapeutic intention of normalising the abnormal structure and function of tumour vascular net- works, e.g. via alleviating stress-induced vaso-occlusion, is to improve chemo-, immuno- and radiation therapy efficacy. Although both strategies have shown therapeutic potential, it remains unclear why they often fail to control glioma invasion into the surrounding healthy brain tissue. To shed light on this issue, we propose a mathematical model of glioma invasion focusing on the interplay between the mi- gration/proliferation dichotomy (Go-or-Grow) of glioma cells and modulations of the functional tumour vasculature. Vaso-modulatory interventions are modelled by varying the degree of vaso-occlusion. We discovered the existence of a critical cell proliferation/diffusion ratio that separates glioma invasion re- sponses to vaso-modulatory interventions into two distinct regimes. While for tumours, belonging to one regime, vascular modulations reduce the tumour front speed and increase the infiltration width, for those in the other regime the invasion speed increases and infiltration width decreases. We show how these in silico findings can be used to guide individualised approaches of vaso-modulatory treatment strategies and thereby improve success rates.

Link:arXiv:1604.05082http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05082