Aleah Caulin

  • Academic Institution: University of Pennsylvania
  • Program Year: 3
  • Practicum(s):
    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2012)
  • Degree(s):
    B.S. Biology, Boston College, 5/2008
  • Field of Study: Genomics and Computational Biology
  • Academic Advisor: Carlo Maley

Summary of Research:

Cancer is a consequence of multicellularity. If every cell has some chance of becoming cancerous, then large, long-lived organisms should have an increased risk of developing cancer compared to small, short-lived organisms. The lack of correlation between body size, lifespan and cancer risk is known as Peto’s Paradox. This suggests that large, long-lived animals have evolved mechanisms that allow them to be more resistant to carcinogenesis than small, short-lived animals. Research on how they achieve this resistance holds the promise of potential improvements in cancer prevention for humans.

There have been many hypotheses proposed to explain Peto’s Paradox; however, none of them has been fully tested. My research focuses on the development of computational models, both mathematical and agent-based, that will serve as an environment to test all of these hypotheses in order to prioritize which ideas we should pursue in the future. The goal is to determine what parameter space, representative of different biological mechanisms, allows for the probability of cancer, given a certain age, to be roughly equal across all sized organisms. When we get better cancer incidence data on various species, I will be able to adapt the models to fit each individual species and re-evaluate our previous results. It is not currently feasible to test all of the possible explanations for Peto’s Paradox in the lab so it is necessary to use computation to begin to explore this field. The results of these models will guide experiments to answer Peto’s Paradox and aid in the development of cancer prevention in humans.

Publications:

Fox, Aleah K, Tuch, Brian B, Chuang, Jeffrey H. Measuring the prevalence of regional mutation rates: an analysis of silent substitutions in mammals, fungi, and insects. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2008, 8:186.

Caulin, Aleah F and Maley, Carlo C. Peto’s Paradox: Evolution’s Prescription for Cancer Prevention. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, (2011) Vol 26 Issue 4, pp. 175-182.

Benjamin Roche, Michael E. Hochberg, Aleah F. Caulin, Carlo C. Maley, Robert A. Gatenby, Dorothee Misse, Frederic Thomas. Natural resistance to cancers: a Darwinian hypothesis to explain Peto’s paradox. BMC Cancer 2012, 12:387.

Liu N, Caulin AF, Graham T, Jablons D, Maley CC. Within-tumor genetic diversity in lung cancer. Journal of the American College of Surgeons. 2012, 215(3), pp. S38.

Awards:

Excellence in Genome Science Frontiers Award 2008
Cum laude May 2008
Accepted to Honors Biology Program, Boston College, Sept 2007
Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution Undergraduate Diversity Award 2007