When
Monday, April 27, 2026, at 12:00 p.m.
Jasmine Foo
Associate Head
Northrop Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor
School of Mathematics
University of Minnesota
"Dosing in a Complex World: The Tumor Microenvironment as a Modulator of Therapeutic Response"
Keating 103 | Zoom link
Hosts: Swarna Ganesh and Kellen Chen
Abstract: The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a key driver of therapy response in cancer. In this talk I will discuss two complementary modeling studies that explore how the TME modulates therapy outcome and how this impacts dosing strategies. First, I will discuss some recent work on modeling bispecific T cell engagers, which facilitate the recruitment of a patient's T cells to kill tumor cells. Using a model calibrated to in vitro experiments with human epidermoid carcinoma cells, we will explore the key drivers of patient response heterogeneity, discuss a dosing threshold that influences response variability and propose a biomarker of therapeutic response. Second, I will discuss drug-induced stromal-mediated resistance in colorectal cancer and examine how the drug-stroma-tumor interaction results in complex dose-response relationships and their implications for dosing protocols. Together these studies illustrate how mechanistic modeling can lead to actionable dosing principles from complex TME interactions.
Bio: Jasmine Foo is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. She completed her PhD in applied mathematics at Brown University and postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Her research group works broadly in the areas of mathematical oncology, therapy optimization and design evolutionary theory and population dynamics.