The dynamics of an artificial tumor-immune – ecosystem after simulated radiation therapy (RT) was investigated. The system is represented by a model for a tumor – host-tissue system including repopulation, mutation, competition and interaction with antibodies and a perceptron used for antigen pattern recognition. The perceptron response governs the generation of antibodies. The system exhibit interesting dynamic aspects: A special focus of the presented work lies on the observed separation of the perceptron weights for tumor – and host tissue, After RT application, the weights for host tissue can evolve into negative values whereas tumor-related perceptron weights remain positive. The negative perceptron weights indicate an immune-suppressive effect after RT which is related to the host tissue. The applicability of the presented system to clinical treatment optimization is not possible and may remain strongly limited when refined. The matching with a real-world tumor-immune-ecosystem (in patient) is questionable and the chosen approach may be too simplistic. However, the idea of an immune system considered as a trainable perceptron offers new hypothesis for novel approaches to anti-cancer treatments, treatments of infectious diseases or even vaccination.

In this contribution, we propose a system-level compartmental population dynamics model of tumour cells that interact with the patient (innate) immune system under the impact of radiation therapy (RT). The resulting in silico - model enables us to analyse the system-level impact of radiation on the tumour ecosystem. The Tumour Control Probability (TCP) was calculated for varying conditions concerning therapy fractionation schemes, radio-sensitivity of tumour sub-clones, tumour population doubling time, repair speed and immunological elimination parameters. The simulations exhibit a therapeutic benefit when applying the initial 3 fractions in an interval of 2 days instead of daily delivered fractions. This effect disappears for fast-growing tumours and in the case of incomplete repair. The results suggest some optimisation potential for combined hyperthermia-radiotherapy. Regarding the sensitivity of the proposed model, cellular repair of radiation-induced damages is a key factor for tumour control. In contrast to this, the radio-sensitivity of immune cells does not influence the TCP as long as the radio-sensitivity is higher than those for tumour cells. The influence of the tumour sub-clone structure is small (if no competition is included). This work demonstrates the usefulness of in silico – modelling for identifying optimisation potentials.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that humanity has a time window of about 12 years in order to prevent anthropogenic climate change of catastrophic magnitude. Green house gas emission from air travel, which is currently rising, is possibly one of the factors that can be most readily reduced. Within this context, we advocate for the re-design of academic conferences in order to decrease their environmental footprint. Today, virtual technologies hold the promise to substitute many forms of physical interactions and increasingly make their way into conferences to reduce the number of travelling delegates. Here, we present the results of a survey in which we gathered the opinion on this topic of academics worldwide. Results suggest there is ample room for challenging the (dangerous) business-as-usual inertia of scientific lifestyle.