ANALYTICAL APPROXIMATION FOR THE NONLINEAR DYNAMICS OF ERK ACTIVATION IN THE PRESENCE OF COMPETITIVE INHIBITOR

The extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK), a subfamily of Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) pathways, is one of the most important signals in the regulation of many biological processes. Deregulated of MAPK signaling pathways has been observed in human cancers with potential involvement in most of all cellular processes leading to tumorigenesis so that it became a potential target for therapy in cancer patients. In this paper, we discuss a Mathematical model of ERK activation in the presence of a small molecule inhibitor that competes with RAS. We present analytical expressions for the concentration of RAS, complex RAS-ERK, complex RAS-Inhibitor, and activated ERK in terms of dimensionless parameters using He’s Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM). The analytical results are compared with numerical simulation and satisfactory agreement is obtained