Een kijkje in de geheime samenleving van een tumor

A tumor arises when one cell decides not to work for the body, but for its own gain. When this cell isn't stopped in time, it can start its own society that develops rapidly and with every passing day is increasingly difficult to stop. To ensure that doctors and medicines have another chance, it is important to analyse the social structure of cells within this society. We need to learn how tumor cells communicate with each other and with other cells to understand what procedures to do, so that the tumor disappears as soon as possible. In this presentation we take a look at the mysterious society of cancer. You will get an idea of how biology works behind this society, what beautiful network mathematics can be used to map the social network of this society, and what interventions based on this mathematics potential can be done to pull society back into the tumor to the benefit of a cancer patient.

Mike van Santvoort is a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology specializing in chance networks (networks with an underlying random process) and computational biology (designing mathematical models within biology). His research focuses on making models that use RNA measurements from cancer patients to estimate cell-cell communication networks of the tumor micro-environment. He will defend his PhD in 2026.