Determining the relative prevalence of different subpopulations in heterogeneous cancer tissue

One of the most important challenges in cancer therapy is dealing with the heterogeneity of the cancer cell population. A patient having a certain kind of cancer will not, in general, have a tumor composed of only one kind of cancerous cell, but the tumor will be composed of different kinds of cells, each responding differently to a particular targeted drug (or cocktail of drugs). This is one of the reasons why two people having the same kind of cancer, as per traditional classification, do not respond the same way to the same cocktail of chemotherapeutic drugs. Modeling this heterogeneity in the population of cancer cells in a given patient is thus a problem pertinent to cancer therapy and can lead to customization of chemotherapy treatment on a patient to patient basis. This paper develops a theoretical approach utilizing experimental measurements for determining the relative prevalence of different subpopulations in a heterogeneous tumor.