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Using ecological models in biomedicine

Fred Adler

University of Utah

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Although sometimes scorned as "people who count animals," ecologists have faced the sheer messiness of their subject to lead innovation in incorporating complexity and uncertainty into unified modeling approaches. This thinking is finding new applications throughout biomedicine. For example, accurately modeling the dynamics of disease within individual patients or across populations is central to predicting outcomes of treatments and strategies to extend life or eradicate disease. But individuals differ, with differences including fixed factors like genotype, predictable factors like age, and the progression of the disease itself. Evolutionary ecologists have developed a framework to capture the dynamics of heterogeneous populations: Integral Projection Models (IPM), a type of discrete-time model which use a set of evolutionary and demographic sub-models to describe and track how the distribution of a trait, such as size, changes between measurements. These models conform elegantly to empirical observations, but despite their power and convenience, have rarely been used in biomedical science. I present applications and extensions of this method to the course of disease progression in cystic fibrosis and new work on the interplay between genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity in cancer.