Berenike Maier, Johannes Berg and Joachim Krug

Resistance to drug treatment is a problem of growing importance in many areas of medicine. This seminar starts with a look at the mechanisms of drug resistance both in microbial infections and in cancer.
Then statistical and dynamical approaches will be explored which describe the evolution of drug resistance in a population of cells. One aspect of particular interest from the point of view of physics is the
effect of spatial structure: when drug concentrations are uneven, cells first develop resistance in areas of low drug levels before successfully spreading to areas of higher concentrations.

Specific topics include

• Molecular targets and mechanisms of drug resistance : (6.11. Melih)
• Mutations and the analysis and modelling of fluctuations (20.11. Prasanna)
• Antibiotic cycling and adaptive landscapes (4.11. Jan Schmidt)
• The morbidostat (18.12. Christoph)
• Game theoretical description of drug resistance (8.1. Nandita Chaturvedi)
• Drug resistance emerging in a drug gradient (22.1. Sebastian Euler)
• The search for optimal drug schedules in cancer (29.1. Nina Müller)

You can find further information on these topics in this presentation. Prasanna Bhogale is in charge of scheduling (pbhogale@thp.uni-koeln.de).

Schedule

Picture credit: Acquisition of multi-drug resistance in biofilm. Red and green cells carry single resistance genes. Yellow cells are doubly-resistant. Copyright Berenike Maier.