The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine offers a series of Topics in Interdisciplinary Medicine (TIME) courses as part of its Genes to Society medical student curriculum. As part of this year’s Cancer TIME program I taught the Frontiers in Cancer Therapy track with Dr. Shawn Lupold from the Department of Urology. This year was the 7th that Dr. Lupold and I taught. We had a record-breaking 11 students sign up for our section. Several of the students who selected this track planned to pursue post-graduate residency training in diverse specialties that include cancer care and others stated that they just wanted to improve their knowledge of cutting-edge cancer treatments. On the first day, Dr. Lupold and I presented a cancer overview lecture on new approaches to cancer therapy. Dr. Lupold presented on new molecular cancer treatments based off the Hallmarks of Cancer. I presented an overview of game theory and adaptive paradigms for cancer treatment. Each year brings many new molecular treatments and adaptive dosing approaches for optimal outcomes. On days 2 and 3, the students presented a recent article they chose from a list of over 40 new curated articles Dr. Lupold and I created. The topic categories included; - Prevention - Microenvironment mechanisms - Targeted therapies - Combination therapies - Immunotherapy - Gene therapy - Biomarker targeted therapy - Therapeutic dosing and tumor response; and - Cancer physics, computation and information - A new category this year was “drugging the undruggable targets”. “This is an exceedingly rewarding experience each year I teach the course. I learn a lot from the high level discussions by these outstanding Johns Hopkins medical students.”- Dr. J. James Frost, of BioMolecular Imaging. The publications presented by the students spanned a wide array of topics. There were 5 articles that dealt with cancer prevention. There were 3 on clinical trials that focused on the polio virus, IDH mutants, and high folate alpha expression. A cancer screening article examined the role of MRI in prostate biopsy for prostate cancer. A game theory article dealt with optimization of treatment for prostate and other cancers. Finally, a truly novel approach examined the scientific feasibility of silencing mutant KRAS by inducing its misfolding and aggregation, much like amyloid aggregation in the brain. To see the compete list of 2023 Cancer TIME Student Tutorial Articles please visit the blog post here https://www.drjjamesfrost.com/post/the-johns-hopkins-university-school-of-medicine-2023-cancer-time-student-tutorial Direct Contact E-mail: DRJJAMESFROST@GMAIL.COM Website: www.DrJJamesFrost.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/drjjamesfrost Facebook: www.facebook.com/drjjamesfrost LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjjamesfrost/ SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/drjjamesfrost ORCHID ID: www.orchid.org/0000-0002-5148-6560

The trade-offs between communication and computation in cancer wasn't something I was thinking about when I wrote Cancer’s Intelligence. I purely considered the computational and decision engine aspects of cancer as an intelligent biologic entity. However, a recent publication entitled Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex, but both costs are needed to predict synapse number by WB Levy and VG Calvert sharply points out to me that I had omitted an important counterpart of computation: communication. I thought to myself, "Communication or information transfer is essential to transmit the results of an intelligent decision engine of any system to the active components of that system." Since energy is always limited, the optimal balance between computation and communication is a requirement for cancer's efficient survival as a system of genotypically and phenotypically diverse cells, from the primary tumor to the tumor microenvironment to metastases and the metastatic niche. As Levy and Calvert carefully examine the energetic costs for computation and communication in the brain, so must we accomplish the same for cancer, including bits per joule, channel capacity, and maximal entropy constraints on efficiency. In contrast to the human brain, for cancer the goal is to understand computation and communication in order to radically disrupt them and destroy the cancer. Cancer is currently attacked by disrupting communication at the level of cellular receptors and other signaling proteins, but there is no well understood underlying theory to guide treatment from the communication or computation standpoints. In Cancer’s Intelligence I outlined several approaches to the cancer computation problem and in Symmetry and symmetry breaking in cancer: a foundational approach to the cancer problem I outlined some approaches to blocking communication, e.g., attacking cancer network nodes of greatest broken symmetry where network vulnerability is highest. Future cancer investigations will benefit by taking note of the Levy and Calvert work and creating similar theoretical underpinnings for cancer. References: https://www.genengnews.com/news/cancer-cells-seize-signaling-pathway-used-by-neurons-to-metastasize William B Levy https://facultydirectory.virginia.edu/faculty/wbl Victoria G. Calvert https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Victoria+G.+Calvert+ Keywords: computation and communication modeling models, physical computing, system functions, scientific study, Trade-offs and Sensor Selection energy For more information on cancer, intelligence, computation, game theory, Boolean network, please view the FULL TEXT HERE CONTACT: E-mail: DRJJAMESFROST@GMAIL.COM Website: www.DrJJamesFrost.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/drjjamesfrost Facebook: www.facebook.com/drjjamesfrost LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjjamesfrost/ SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/drjjamesfrost ORCHID ID: www.orchid.org/0000-0002-5148-6560