New Scientist
Image: GE Healthcare
Cancer remains a formidable foe even 40 years after Richard Nixon officially declared war on it. A new and controversial hypothesis now offers hope that the war can ultimately be won. It suggests tumours have a limited ability to evade modern therapies – a consequence of the idea that cancer is our most distant animal ancestor, a “living fossil” from over 600 million years ago.
Some cancers evolve resistance to a treatment within a few years. One possible explanation for this is that the cells within a tumour act independently, competing with one another via natural selection to evolve therapy-dodging innovations.
Astrobiologists Charles Lineweaver at the Australian National University in Canberra and Paul Davies at Arizona State University in Tempe have an alternative explanation. They say that evidence of basic cellular cooperation within tumours suggests cancers are a throwback from the origin of the animal kingdom – and that any ability to resist modern drugs relies on an ancient and ultimately limited array of survival tactics. Read more on newscientist.com…
