Via Brendan Maher I got to know about this news feature in last week’s Nature.
The article opens mentioning something something that evolutionary biologists are familiar with, but that is sometimes forgotten in other fields, that although randomness plays an important role, evolution is not random. Thus cancers have common themes in their progression. Unfortunately one of the biggest targets in cancer research, genetics, might not be the best place to look for those commonalities. According to Bert Vogelstein , as quoted in the article There are few genes that are commonly mutated; we call these the mountains; but the landscape is dominated by hills.
A different approach, viewing the tumour as an evolving ecosystem, is advocated by researchers like Carlo Maley which advocates that the heterogeneity of a tumour is a good predictor of the likelihood for progression towards malignancy. Although the article mentions that this could be the result of the body having to defend itself from many different types of aggressions my bet is that a heterogeneous population is more capable of adapting to the environment and can evolve faster.
Hopefully we will see more physicians using their evolutionary glasses when studying AND treating cancer. A presentation I attended this week at Moffitt by our very own Ariosto Silva and Robert Gatenby (Dr. Gatenby is a senior member, scientist and physician) makes me believe that it could be so.
Update: Seems that Vogelstein’s comment criticising cancer genomics have to do with papers from his group in this week’s issue of Nature and Science.
Ha! I read the article on my train to Rome, back from a Conference. I thought “I should write to David and let him know”. But here you are, covering it.
Ciao!
Massimo
Hi Massimo, don’t doubt to send articles like this my way.
Did you like Nature’s feature then?
David
It was great, David, very inspiring. I also much liked the article just before that, The Production Line.
Ciao!
Massimo