This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology, ISMCO 2021, held in October 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 3 full papers and 4 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: statistical and machine learning methods for cancer research; mathematical modeling for cancer research; spatio-temporal tumor modeling and simulation; general cancer computational biology; mathematical modeling for cancer research; computational methods for anticancer drug development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology, ISMCO 2020, which was supposed to be held in San Diego, CA, USA, in October 2020, but was instead held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 6 full papers and 4 short papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: statistical and machine learning methods for cancer research; mathematical modeling for cancer research; general cancer computational biology; and posters.

Introduction to Mathematical Oncology presents biologically well-motivated and mathematically tractable models that facilitate both a deep understanding of cancer biology and better cancer treatment designs. It covers the medical and biological background of the diseases, modeling issues, and existing methods and their limitations. The authors introduce mathematical and programming tools, along with analytical and numerical studies of the models. They also develop new mathematical tools and look to future improvements on dynamical models. After introducing the general theory of medicine and exploring how mathematics can be essential in its understanding, the text describes well-known, practical, and insightful mathematical models of avascular tumor growth and mathematically tractable treatment models based on ordinary differential equations. It continues the topic of avascular tumor growth in the context of partial differential equation models by incorporating the spatial structure and physiological structure, such as cell size. The book then focuses on the recent active multi-scale modeling efforts on prostate cancer growth and treatment dynamics. It also examines more mechanistically formulated models, including cell quota-based population growth models, with applications to real tumors and validation using clinical data. The remainder of the text presents abundant additional historical, biological, and medical background materials for advanced and specific treatment modeling efforts. Extensively classroom-tested in undergraduate and graduate courses, this self-contained book allows instructors to emphasize specific topics relevant to clinical cancer biology and treatment. It can be used in a variety of ways, including a single-semester undergraduate course, a more ambitious graduate course, or a full-year sequence on mathematical oncology.

With chapters on free boundaries, constitutive equations, stochastic dynamics, nonlinear diffusion–consumption, structured populations, and applications of optimal control theory, this volume presents the most significant recent results in the field of mathematical oncology. It highlights the work of world-class research teams, and explores how different researchers approach the same problem in various ways. Tumors are complex entities that present numerous challenges to the mathematical modeler. First and foremost, they grow. Thus their spatial mean field description involves a free boundary problem. Second, their interiors should be modeled as nontrivial porous media using constitutive equations. Third, at the end of anti-cancer therapy, a small number of malignant cells remain, making the post-treatment dynamics inherently stochastic. Fourth, the growth parameters of macroscopic tumors are non-constant, as are the parameters of anti-tumor therapies. Changes in these parameters may induce phenomena that are mathematically equivalent to phase transitions. Fifth, tumor vascular growth is random and self-similar. Finally, the drugs used in chemotherapy diffuse and are taken up by the cells in nonlinear ways. Mathematical Oncology 2013 will appeal to graduate students and researchers in biomathematics, computational and theoretical biology, biophysics, and bioengineering.