The Frieboes lab at UofL pursues an improved understanding of disease progression and response to treatment by applying principles from engineering and the physical sciences. The lab expertise is focused on the development and integration of mathematical modeling, computational simulation, and experimental biology techniques to study cancer. This work is part of the burgeoning field of “Physical Oncology,” in which cancer is studied not only from a biological standpoint but also as a physical system using mathematics and physics. This interdisciplinary study of cancer requires that experimental and clinical data drive the computational and modeling work. The aim of Dr. Frieboes’ research is to predict tumor behavior from the molecular and cellular scale events, with the ultimate goal to help guide the treatment of individual patients. This novel research intersects the fields of cancer biology, scientific computing, data visualization, mathematical biology, and physical oncology.

The ultimate goal of this integrated physical sciences/biology work is to dramatically improve cancer treatment outcomes. To this end, the work can be divided into the following scientific contributions:

Mathematical modeling and computational simulation to characterize tumor growth
Multiscale linking of molecular- to cell- to-tissue-scale events during tumor progression
Integration of modeling and experimentation to characterize cancer treatment response
Modeling and simulation of cancer nanotherapy
Modeling and simulation of cancer immunotherapy

Personnel:

Dylan Goodin, Olivia S Cooney, and Hermann B Frieboes

Computational Methods:

The computational methods include:

(1) Solution of partial differential equations (PDE) and multigrid techniques. The PDE solution is computed using an internally developed C++ program that uses two parallel processing libraries: (1) CUDA and (2) MPI, both of which are readily available from Nvidia and openMPI, respectively.

(2) Solution of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) equations.

Software:

(1) Two compilers used for the PDE project: (1) MPI’s mpicc C++ wrapper compiler and (2) CUDA’s nvcc compiler. Result visualization is done via Matlab.

(2) CFD software such as ANSYS or SolidWorks

Grants:

Publications:

Dylan A Goodin, Hermann B Frieboes; Evaluation of innate and adaptive immune system interactions in the tumor microenvironment via a 3D continuum model. Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 559,21 February 2023, 1113832023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519322003745

Dylan A Goodin, Eric Chau, Anjana Tiwari, Biana Godin, Hermann B Frieboes; Multiple breast cancer liver metastases response to macrophage-delivered nanotherapy evaluated via a 3D continuum model. Immunology 2023 Jun;169(2):132-140. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/imm.13615

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