New paper published on Bioinformatics

A couple of years ago, we started a collaboration with the IEO (Istituto Europeo di Oncologia). Prof. Pelicci and his staff investigate Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), one of the most common hematological malignancies, characterized by high relapse and mortality rates. The guys at IEO are wonderful, brilliant, I learned a lot in these months and the collaboration is definitely one of the best I have experienced in my career, challenging and fulfilling.

Speaking of challenges, in this work we investigated the presence of multiple sub-populations in AML cells, causing a particular pattern in fluorescence histograms collected in vivo from human xenografts in mice.

The beauty of this paper is that we had to create a radically novel modeling and (stochastic) simulation framework, that we named ProCell. In order to run simulations, we also needed a parameter estimation methodology to fit the experimental data. FST-PSO was our natural choice, and it seemslessly performed its task with remarkable accuracy.

Today, the paper about ProCell has been finally published in the Bioinformatics journal. The paper has a Open Access licence and a pre-print can be downloaded from the publications section of this website. The results we present suggest that a model characterized by three populations – one of them quiescent during the considered time window – represents the best explanation for the observed fluorescence histograms.