Teaching cancer chemotherapy by means of a computer simulation

BIO-1014 is an educational computer-based program written in TURBO PASCAL 3.01 which simulates experiments of antitumour activity. Basically, this program offers the user the possibility of checking the therapeutical efficiency of anticancer drugs as applied to different tumors, but many other types of experiment can be also performed with BIO-1014. Drugs such as methotrexate, cyclophosphamide and arabinosylcytosine can be tested on the following tumors: sarcoma, carcinoma, leukemia and melanoma. The dose, the number of treatments per day, the total number of treatments and the time interval between the treatments are the parameters to be adjusted for each therapeutical schedule. Tumoral growth, cause of death and survival are among the results that are generated after each simulation. These results are either tabulated or plotted. In addition, four statistical tests have also been integrated to the program in order to provide with a way to check whether or not there is a significant difference in terms of survival between two groups of mice differently treated. Furthermore, the program has been elaborated to also consider some physiological phenomena met within an anticancer drug screening programme. The potential and the performance of the program BIO-1014 is presented and discussed.