Kateřina Staňková

Kateřina Staňková

Associate professor/Technology Fellow

TU Delft

(ORCID)

Improving cancer treatment through game theory

In this talk, we will investigate cancer treatment as a game-theoretic contest between the physician's therapy and the cancer cells'resistance strategies. This game has two critical advantages for the physician: (1) Only the physician can play rationally. Cancer cells, like all evolving organisms, can only adapt to current conditions; they can neither anticipate nor evolve adaptations for treatments that the physician has not yet applied. (2) It has a distinctive Stackelberg (leader-follower) structure; the "leader" oncologist plays first and the "follower" cancer cells then respond and adapt to therapy.  We will learn how the physician can exploit their advantages in this game. This approach leads to evolutionary cancer therapies, i.e.  therapies that anticipate and steer treatment-induced resistance in cancer cells. We will illustrate how patient data can be utilized for that purpose and show evidence for superiority of the evolutionary therapy against standard of care from ongoing clinical trials.

Short bio

Katerina is since September 2021 an associate professor and Delft Technology Fellow at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of TU Delft, where she is responsible for research in healthcare, a new emerging topic of the faculty.  She has a doctorate from the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics in Stackelberg game theory and obtained postdoctoral experience at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in system identification and at the Delft Center for Systems and Control in game-theory based optimal control. Before joining TU Delft, she was assistant and associate professor at Maastricht University, where she set up and led its Dynamic Game Theory team. Katerina leads a number of national and international projects, such as the European Training Network “EvoGamePlus – Evolutionary Game Theory and Population Dynamics: From Theory to Applications” and the Netherlands Research Foundation (NWO) project “Understanding cancer through evolutionary game theory and dynamic systems theory”. She is recipient of the inaugural  NWO Stairway to Impact award (2020) for designing novel cancer therapies and bringing them to clinical trials.