Mathematics for child health

Many people in Russia know about the Dima Rogachev Centre - particularly those who have faced the challenge of child cancer. The centre is Europe's largest pediatric cancer care facility and is named after a boy with advanced cancer who wrote a letter to President Putin inviting him to visit; the invitation was accepted, and after the visit, the decision was made to build a state-of-the-art Centre for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, based in the Research Institute of Pediatric Hematology. The new centre was named after Dmitry 'Dima' Rogachev who died two years later at the age of 12 while the centre was still under construction.

Doctors Seeking Help from Mathematicians

There is a waiting list for the centre which provides the best pediatric cancer treatment available in Russia - for example, lymphoblastic leukemia used to be a largely fatal condition in Russia in the early 1990s, and its ten-year survival rates did not exceed 10%. Today, the survival rate is 85%, yet further progress beyond this has been a struggle.

In 2011, Russian oncologists looked beyond what medicine could offer, and Alexander Karachunsky, Deputy Director for Research of the Federal Research Center of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Immunology (the Dmitry Rogachev Centre) contacted the HSE School of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence. "He hoped that the mathematicians and programmers there could help doctors with data analysis and the modeling of disease progression and treatment response," according to Sergei Kuznetsov, Head of the School, "and he asked us to find out why certain drugs and therapies work for some patients, but not others. The medics were interested in how the treatment response might vary depending on the patient's physiology, such as the state of the internal organs and blood, and the role of genetics."

A Personalised Approach

Many doctors now believe that it may be possible to identify patient subgroups for whom the use of a particular drug or type of therapy can be preferable, based on patient profiles.

Today, personalised medicine is an important trend in health care and particularly in pharmacology. It means that the choice of drugs and treatment regimens is based on the patient's individual profile, including their physiological, biochemical and genetic makeup, and other parameters. Rather than treat the disease, medics are moving towards treating a specific person. In fact, the traditional approach where drugs are designed and administered to treat a certain ailment has been found ineffective in many cases. According to the WHO, conventional pharmacology fails to produce the desired effect in 20% to 70% of ulcer patients, 5% to 57% of diabetes patients, 10% to 75% of hypertension patients, and 70% to 100% of cancer patients. Many experts argue that taking into account individual characteristics, including genetic factors, may be particularly important in cancer treatment.