Game Theory and Cancer
Game theoretic scenarios are generally analyzed in contexts where the “players” of the “game” are people or animals such as the classic “Hawk-Dove” and “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” However, game theory need not be contextualized solely in this manner. Games arise in much more micro scenarios as well. Applying game theoretic analyses to micro organisms could greatly improve the understanding of diseases.
Most recently, the Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center has promoted a new initiative to apply classical game theory principles to cancer cells, modeling how they metastasize and invade healthy cells. In addition to the Princeton Center, researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida have recently published a paper that discusses how cancer cells can be viewed in the context of their ecosystem, in the same way a the hawk and dove are viewed as opponents in an ecosystem. Once the “players” in this ecosystem are determined, the researchers argue that evolutionary game theory, an interdisciplinary subfield which applies game theory to biological populations, can be applied to better steer treatment of the cancer in a patient.
Both of these developments are ways in which the interdisciplinary nature of Networks stretches even further than Economics, Information Science, Computer Science, and Sociology. Networks and their analyses can also be combined with the natural sciences to better understand ecological phenomena, epidemiology, and, in the case of research centers described above, some of the most life threatening diseases.
Sources:
Nature: Cancer Biology Still Needs Physicists
MIT Technology Review: Game Theory and the Treatment of Cancer