Ohio State University scientists have designed a mathematical model that someday could guide treatment decisions for advanced prostate cancer, in part by helping doctors predict how individual patients will respond to therapy based on the biology of their tumors.

The researchers selected parameters to plug into the equations that more specifically detail what could be going on in an individual tumor: cancer cell growth rates, cancer cell death rates, the level of activation of PSA in tumor cells, and how quickly one person’s PSA can travel from the prostate to the bloodstream.

Ref.: Harsh Vardhan Jaina et al., Mathematical modeling of prostate cancer progression in response to androgen ablation therapy, PNAS, 2011 [DOI:10.1073/pnas.1115750108]