Applying ecological and evolutionary theory to cancer: a long and winding road

Abstract

Since the mid 1970s, cancer has been described as a process of Darwinian evolution, with somatic cellular selection and evolution being the fundamental processes leading to malignancy and its many manifestations (neoangiogenesis, evasion of the immune system, metastasis, and resistance to therapies). Historically, little attention has been placed on applications of evolutionary biology to understanding and controlling neoplastic progression and to prevent therapeutic failures. This is now beginning to change, and there is a growing international interest in the interface between cancer and evolutionary biology. The objective of this introduction is first to describe the basic ideas and concepts linking evolutionary biology to cancer. We then present four major fronts where the evolutionary perspective is most developed, namely laboratory and clinical models, mathematical models, databases, and techniques and assays. Finally, we discuss several of the most promising challenges and future prospects in this interdisciplinary research direction in the war against cancer.

Evolutionary foundations for cancer biology

“…The central roles of tumor microenvironment in suppressing and promoting cancer make ecological theory an essential tool for cancer researchers, as illustrated by four papers on the topic in this special issue (Thomas et al this issue; Ewald and Swain Ewald this issue; Daoust et al this issue; Alfarouk et al this issue). Daoust et al (this issue) describe applications of landscape ecology to cancer, offering methods for identifying tissue microhabitats that influence tissue growth, and vulnerability to metastasis.…”

Using Systems Biology to Understand Cancer as an Evolutionary Process

“…This hypothesis lay dormant for decades before being further developed and confirmed with empirical results from modern cancer biology [14,21,29,56,57,67]. Currently though, "cancer development at the cellular level is widely regarded as a Darwinian evolutionary process involving "natural selection" of genetically variant cells in the context of a complex microenvironmental ecology" [6].…”

A primer on recent developments in cancer immunotherapy, with a focus on neoantigen vaccines

“…These mechanisms also underlie cancer' s uncanny ability to acquire additional phenotypes such as eliciting immune tolerance and angiogenesis. A recent proposal that epigenetics alone may be sufficient to generate the hallmarks of cancer [42] may, amongst other things, alter our understanding of the time scales involved in tumor response [43] . The careful examination of tumor cell evolution and its therapeutic implications are in its beginning stages [44][45][46][47] .…”