28 April 2023
Andre Levchenko
Departments of Biomedical Engineering and of Physics
Yale University
Cancers are diseases stemming from altered regulatory networks controlling cell identity and function. In a way, they are naturally run experiments allowing us to test our understanding of how such networks have evolved and how cell and tissue identities emerge and are maintained. In this talk, I will try to establish the quantitative framework for modeling and understanding cellular identity, its plasticity and changes in both during cancer onset and procession. In particular, I will hypothesize about the roles of epigenetic control and signaling interactions in these phenomena and how the analysis of cancer can help us refine our understanding of complex tissues.