Comments on: Inside Darwin's Tumor

By: Science-Based Medicine » Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? (Revisited): Personalized medicine versus evolution

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:59:57 +0000

[...] Inside Darwin’s tumor, indeed. The tumor cells that survived chemotherapy acquired new mutations that allowed them to regrow even faster. The parallels between cancer biology and antibiotic resistance are both sobering and humbling, the attempts of evolution denialists to paint evolution as irrelevant to medicine notwithstanding. [...]

By: Natural Cures For Sore Throat

Natural Cures For Sore Throat — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:30:31 +0000

[...] Inside Darwin’s Tumor | The LoomCancer evolves. Those two words may sound strange together. Sure, birds evolve. Bacteria evolve. But cancer? The trouble arises from the fact that cancers, unlike birds and bacteria, are not free-living organisms. They start out as cells inside a person’s body and stay there, until they’re either wiped out or the person dies. * Yet the same forces that drive the evolution of free-living … Read News [...]

By: linkfest – 01/15/12 « hbd* chick

linkfest – 01/15/12 « hbd* chick — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:01:32 +0000

[...] Inside Darwin’s Tumor – cancer evolves. @the loom. [...]

By: My Picks – 15 January 2012 « Joy of Science

My Picks – 15 January 2012 « Joy of Science — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:23:27 +0000

[...] A new paper clearly shows Cancer is a “moving target” and Carl Zimmer explains it. [...]

By: Inside Darwin’s Tumor | nnutter.com

Inside Darwin’s Tumor | nnutter.com — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:39:52 +0000

[...] you are interested in what we do at The Genome Institute Discover posted a nice synopsis of a paper our group recently published in Nature. One of the highlights was the following image [...]

By: Wzrd1

Wzrd1 — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:37:19 +0000

The vast number of mutations show that much of the genome is conserved, but portions are poorly conserved. The polar opposite of our normal cells, which conserve all portions of the genome.
One wonders if THAT might be a target to attack, the poorly conserved portions, rather than the usual chemo targets. Perhaps a target in those poorly conserved regions could be triggered with disasterous results for the cancer cells. Perhaps giving those cells an advantage over their peers, with a massive vulnerability, leaving that population as the survivor, then administering a secondary drug that targets the implanted vulnerability.
The trick is, as is typical in chemotherapy, killing the cancer whilst not killing the host.
Since natural selection is in full operation with cancers, why shouldn’t WE be the ones making the selection? Permit only certain cancerous cells, with known vulnerabilities to survive to the final round of treatment, then utilizing the vulnerability to destroy the surviving cancerous cells?

By: Inside Darwin’s Tumor | The Loom | Discover Magazine « linkstream2

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:57:09 +0000

[...] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/01/12/inside-darwins-tumor/ Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]

By: Martin Czigler

Martin Czigler — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:10:28 +0000

There’s something a little bit misleading about this diagram, a confusion between the percentages of the various cancer sub-lines and the absolute number of cells. If you look at the initial diagnosis date, it’s clear they’re representing fractions. But to the left of that they have a swooping curve that seems to indicate growth in the absolute number of cancer cells. If it really were the absolute number of cells, it would imply that the number of cells of the initial mutation (the steel-blue) increased greatly, but then decreased as the other cancer sub-lines originated and grew. The percentage declines, but not the absolute number of cells. This is a minor quibble about some exciting work.

By: Michael Habib

Michael Habib — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:06:26 +0000

Nihaya: The pattern of small isolates taking over under heavy selection is a general numerical pattern of any highly variable, rapidly reproducing system. So, something analogous may have happened with regards to early lifeforms, but I would not apply it too literally to cancer – they do turn on some ancient genes but they’re still highly derived human cells.

This was an excellent summary of the research, and I salute whoever built the figure, as well – it’s one of the best summary figures for cancer line change over time that I’ve seen. A big thumbs up to the artist responsible.

What I would be curious to know next (and I imagine the researchers are looking at this one) is how timing of initial treatment builds into the overall picture of rare isolate takeoff. Early treatment would be expected to limit the time that is available for rare, potentially resistant variants to enter the cancer cell population, so “early is better” would seem to hold true, as usual. Beyond that, however, given that resistant forms seem to do poorly at first in many cases, it could be that many of them lose out to the common strains in some patients before the onset of treatment. As a result, the early diversity of isolates may be fluctuating heavily early on, and this might produce “sweet spots” for treatment onset, where the cancer population happens to be particularly low on diversity as a result of local, competition-related extinction events. If so, oddly enough, it might be time for cancer researchers to start poking around in the extinction literature.

By: Tim Martin

Tim Martin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:47:30 +0000

Catching evolution in action – fascinating!

Evolution becomes our inner foe if mutations disable a cell’s self-restraint.

Though I know very little about biology, when I learned to think of cancer in this way, it was an exciting new way of looking at it. We think of ourselves as one organism, but we’re made up of billions of cells, and no one says they have to toe the party line. Most of the time, our cells cannot run away with our bodies because they have no potential for differential reproduction – thus no way to compete. Cancer is (to put it perhaps over-simply) what happens when some of our cells gain the ability to reproduce on their own, thus paving the way for competition within our bodies.