The contribution of age structure to cell population responses to targeted therapeutics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formalism that uses live cell microscopy to quantify age distributions in cell populations, enabling better modeling of how cell age structure influences responses to targeted cancer therapies.

Contribution

It develops a new method to incorporate age structure data into models of cell population responses, improving analysis of therapeutic effects.

Findings

Quantifiable age distributions can be obtained from live cell microscopy.

Age-structured models better predict cell responses to therapeutics.

The approach reduces reliance on synchronization techniques.

Abstract

Cells grown in culture act as a model system for analyzing the effects of anticancer compounds, which may affect cell behavior in a cell cycle position-dependent manner. Cell synchronization techniques have been generally employed to minimize the variation in cell cycle position. However, synchronization techniques are cumbersome and imprecise and the agents used to synchronize the cells potentially have other unknown effects on the cells. An alternative approach is to determine the age structure in the population and account for the cell cycle positional effects post hoc. Here we provide a formalism to use quantifiable age distributions from live cell microscopy experiments to parameterize an age-structured model of cell population response.