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Kit Gallagher

@kitcgallagher.bsky.social
110 followers 135 following 7 posts

Schmidt Science Fellow @ Massachusetts General Hospital | Harvard Medical School | Broad Institute (Vazquez-Garcia lab). Developing quantitative tools to study cancer evolution through longitudinal and single cell genomics.

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Kit Gallagher @kitcgallagher.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Not every patient benefits equally from adaptive therapy, and some may not benefit at all. How do we tell them apart? @stroblmar.bsky.social created this graphic to show how our biomarkers can answer this question!
Image shows two patient profiles, that spend a different fraction of time under treatment. The proposed biomarkers can stratify these patients based on their first treatment cycle, and determine which will benefit most from adaptive treatment strategies.
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Kit Gallagher @kitcgallagher.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
As featured in the #mathonco newsletter, this inspired an artwork exploring the trade-off between appointment frequency and time to progression (background color). The optimal strategy line separates stable and chaotic outcomes, and we tile this pattern with the highest TTP at each tile's center
When implementing Adaptive Therapy (AT) treatment schedules clinically, patients are monitored (and treatment schedules updated) at discrete time intervals. This leads to a trade-off; more frequent clinical appointments allow greater control of the tumor at a higher average size (leading to longer time to progression, or TTP), but are more costly and logistically challenging to implement. We can derive the optimal threshold size for treatment to be used in an AT protocol, and plot this in white over different time intervals between appointments. This is superimposed over the TTP for all different treatment protocols (given by the coloured background) - super-critical protocols on one side of the optimal line leads to chaotic outcomes while sub-optimal protocols achieve a lower TTP. This pattern is tiled and inverted to create a 'chess board', with the highest TTP at the center of each tile, reflecting the optimal game that clinicians are trying to play against the cancer tumor.
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