Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/02/2026
10:30 am - 11:30 am

BSB 108

Dr. Edward Taylor
Assistant Professor
Toronto Metropolitan University
Profile link: https://www.torontomu.ca/physics/our-people/edward-taylor/

Title: The Physics of Cancer

Abstract:
Cancer – the uncontrolled growth of cells – is overwhelmingly viewed as a genetic disease, with vast monetary and time resources allocated to identifying DNA “targets” to improve cancer treatments. By the time a tumour is large enough to be detectable, however, much of its behaviour can be understood in terms of physics: growth constrained by nutrient transport, cell movement leading to metastatic invasion, and intratumoural spatial phenotypic pattern formation arising from intercellular interactions, to name a few examples. In addition to giving new scientific insight into the behaviour of cancers, incorporating physics into cancer research may lead to new strategies to treat this disease. In this talk, I will briefly review work at the overlap between physics and oncology and then discuss how a model of tumour nutrient transport may be able to predict tumour growth kinetics and response to common treatments.