On February 6-9, the Third International Conference on Mathematics and Statistics (AUS-ICMS’20) was hosted by the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
Partner CNR participated at this conference. The main objective was to provide a forum for researchers and scientists working in all fields of mathematics, statistics and related areas from both academia and industry to exchange research ideas and have in-depth discussions of recent advances in mathematical research. Although the main topic of the conference was mathematics and statistics, several events linked the content to biology at large.
The first one was the keynote lecture that has been given by Oxford’s Professor Philip Maini, a distinguished mathematician which has devoted his academic career to Mathematical Biology. Prof. Maini’s talk tackled the interesting topic of Mathematical Modelling of Collective Cell Migration with examples specific to cancer growth.
The second was a whole workshop session titled “Discrete Dynamic Modelling of Biological Systems” which focused on theoretical studies of intracellular signal networks and gene regulatory networks. The invited speakers of this session described studies ranging from the modelling of cell cycle and metabolism to more theoretical-oriented ones tackling the problem of control in multi-state “canalising” networks. Discrete mathematical modelling of gene regulatory network is one of the techniques used in the math modelling work package of the iPC project. It allows to set up a multiscale dynamics model ranging from the gene regulation to the cell phenotype in the emergence of, for instance, paediatric leukemias such as Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) or Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL). A model of this kind is currently under development by partner CNR in Work Package 6.
Finally, another small session of the conference titled “Math Biology” included talks ranging from techniques to analyse high-resolution medical images, to methods to identify relevant genes in Alzheimer’s disease or model describing the effect of chemotherapy to Glioma.
