Can Scaling Relations Help Us Predict the Response of Drug-Resistant Cells to Drug Combinations?
Wood, Wood, Nishida, Cluzel, Cell Reports 6, 1073 (2014).
Complex physical systems can often be described by simple, empirical laws which unite seemingly disparate systems. These laws are of great scientific importance because they point to shared structural or dynamical features of systems that appear, on the surface, to be very different. In this work, we identified a series of widely applicable scaling relationships that relate the multi-drug response of drug sensitive cells to that of drug resistant cells from the same parental cell line. The goal of the work is to provide a unified description of two-drug response surfaces that does not require a detailed molecular understanding of the resistance mechanism.