Students from the first year Bsc. Nanobiology have made this final exercise for the course Biomolecular Programming. They have designed a program in the programming language Java that simulates chemotherapy to kill cancer cells.
In regular tissue, cells have a finite number of divisions that can take place depending on the cell type, and these divisions are tightly regulated in order to maintain a healthy tissue. In cancer cells cell division is dysregulated resulting in an abnormal growth. Cancer cells grow faster and divide more often and these abnormalities can be used as a target for cancer treatment. Many chemotherapies specifically target dividing cells. Because normal healthy cells also divide, this treatment is not specific. Nevertheless these strategies can still be successful in killing cancer cells and reducing tumor size, while retaining normal tissues. In the Final Exercise you will make a model to test how a chemotherapeutic drug can act on fast dividing cells, thereby eradicating cancer cells while retaining healthy cells.
Students that took the effort to add biological relevant creative or extra elements to the final assignment or with outstanding code are listed below showing their simulations.
Hereby we present the best programs of the year 2023 in random order: