Singular Controls in Systems Describing Tumor Anti-Angiogenesis

Abstract: Anti-angiogenic therapy is a novel treatment approach for cancer that aims at preventing a tumor from developing its own blood supply system that it needs for growth. Since it does not target cancer cells, but healthy cells instead, it is not prone to developing drug resistance, the main obstacle to successful cancer chemotherapy. In this paper a class of systems for anti-angiogenic treatments is considered as optimal control problems and the optimality of singular controls is analyzed. Key–Words: Optimal control, singular controls, high-order conditions for optimality, cancer treatments