Harnessing patient-specific response dynamics to optimize evolutionary therapies for metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma – Learning to adapt

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is one of the ten most common and lethal cancers in the United States. Tumor heterogeneity and development of resistance to treatment suggest that patient-specific evolutionary therapies may hold the key to better patients prognosis. Mathematical models are a powerful tool to help develop such strategies; however, they depend on reliable biomarker information. In this paper, we present a dynamic model of tumor-immune interactions, as well as the treatment effect on tumor cells and the tumor-immune environment. We hypothesize that the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is a powerful biomarker that can be used to predict an individual patient’s response to treatment. Using randomly sampled virtual patients, we show that the model recapitulates patient outcomes from clinical trials in RCC. Finally, we use in silico patient data to recreate realistic tumor behaviors and simulate various treatment strategies to find optimal treatments for each virtual patient.