Philosophy of Cancer

Bertolaso, Marta

doi:10.1007/978-94-024-0865-2

Cited by 50 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…They claim that either the cancer cell and its descendants "recruit" the cells in their microenvironment to "prosper" or that perturbations in the stroma induce DNA mutations and translocations in the parenchymal cells [69][70][71]. In short, this latter group of theories is proposed as a sort of compromise between the SMT and the TOFT [15, 68,[72][73][74][75]. In reality, they are variants of the SMT, given that somatic mutations still play a causal role in them (Table 1).…”

Section: Evaluating Theories Of Carcinogenesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Over a century of cancer research: Inconvenient truths and promising leads

Sonnenschein

Soto

2020

PLoS Biol

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Despite over a century of intensive efforts, the great gains promised by the War on Cancer nearly 50 years ago have not materialized. Since 1999, we have analyzed the lack of progress in explaining and "curing" cancer by examining the merits of the premises that determine how cancer is understood and treated. Our ongoing critical analyses have aimed at clarifying the sources of misunderstandings at the root of the cancer puzzle while providing a plausible and comprehensive biomedical perspective as well as a new theory of carcinogenesis that is compatible with evolutionary theory. In this essay, we explain how this new theory, the tissue organization field theory (TOFT), can help chart a path to progress for cancer researchers by explaining features of cancer that remain unexplainable from the perspective of the still hegemonic somatic mutation theory (SMT) and its variants. Of equal significance, the premises underlying the TOFT offer new perspectives on basic biological phenomena.

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Section: Evaluating Theories Of Carcinogenesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Over a century of cancer research: Inconvenient truths and promising leads

Sonnenschein

Soto

2020

PLoS Biol

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“…Another characteristic of cancer -however less obvious through a conventional static viewpoint with respect to the timescale of animal tissue growth -involves loss of control on cell differentiation (i.e., maturation in a cell lineage from a totally immature stem state to a totally differentiated, mature, state), which is a very dynamic process [2]. The more plastic (i.e., endowed with poor control on differentiations, see Section 1.2) a cancer cell population is, the more malignant is the disease.…”

Section: Basic Facts About Cancermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The atavistic theory of cancer is supported by a growing body of biological observations [44]. Relying on theoretical considerations, suggested by philosophers of science [2,45,46], it has recently been proposed that plasticity in cancer arises due to an anatomically localized loss of control of cell differentiation. This should result from impairments of mechanisms of maintenance of tissue cohesion and functional coherence, that themselves rely on intercellular signaling pathways and can be regarded as part of the immune system [47,48].…”

Section: Debates About the Origin Of Cancermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The so-called "philosophy of cancer" Confronted with the undoubtable successes met in the last 50 years in clinical oncology, nevertheless encountering more and more limitations as new treatments emerge, oncologists together with evolutionary biologists, immunologists, physicists and mathematicians, have begun to lower barriers between their disciplines. This trend of interdisciplinary research has recently reached even up to philosophers [2,46,280,281,282] who have thus emerged as a community of "philosophers of cancer".…”

Section: Need To Rethink Cancer?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving cancer treatments via dynamical biophysical models

Kuznetsov

Clairambault

Volpert

2021

Physics of Life Reviews

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Despite significant advances in oncological research, cancer nowadays remains one of the main causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide. New treatment techniques, as a rule, have limited efficacy, target only a narrow range of oncological diseases, and have limited availability to the general public due their high cost. An important goal in oncology is thus the modification of the types of antitumor therapy and their combinations, that are already introduced into clinical practice, with the goal of increasing the overall treatment efficacy.One option to achieve this goal is optimization of the schedules of drugs administration or performing other medical actions. Several factors complicate such tasks: the adverse effects of treatments on healthy cell populations, which must be kept tolerable; the emergence of drug resistance due to the intrinsic plasticity of heterogeneous cancer cell populations; the interplay between different types of therapies administered simultaneously. Mathematical modeling, in which a tumor and its microenvironment are considered as a single complex system, can address this complexity and can indicate potentially effective protocols, that would require experimental verification. In this review, we consider classical methods, current trends and future prospects in the field of mathematical modeling of tumor growth and treatment. In particular, methods of treatment optimization are discussed with several examples of specific problems related to different types of treatment.

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“…Cancer research is indeed a field particularly prone to the existence of different models. This might be exemplified with two models made to explain the etiology of the disease: the “multigenic and multiphasic model of cancer” and the “epigenetic progenitor model of cancer” [ 2 , 3 ] . The former one relies on the mutational activation of oncogenes and inactivation of tumor suppressor genes.…”

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confidence: 99%

Perspective: plasticity, the enemy of the good

Yvonnet¹,

Barberousse²,

Escargueil³

2019

CDR

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Plasticity is an important feature of modern cancer research. However, the level at which we should consider it remains an open question. Such debate is not new in the field of cancer and can be exemplified by the different models explaining carcinogenesis. Those models mostly explain cell transformation through the deregulation of the internal circuitry. In the last years, those models dramatically increased our knowledge and led to a series of short-term successes in terms of therapeutics. However, cancer drug resistance inevitably arises. Recently, studies on the so-called tumor microenvironment enriched the cell-centered perspective but it also enlarged the complexity of cancer etiology in particular for advanced diseases. Here, we suggest that the plastic and multi-sites specific nature of cancer combined with our incapacity to promise cure should push towards a new perspective where early clinical actions, instead of late ones, should be heralded as the priority of cancer research and care.

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Philosophy of Cancer

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

Over a century of cancer research: Inconvenient truths and promising leads

Over a century of cancer research: Inconvenient truths and promising leads

Improving cancer treatments via dynamical biophysical models

Perspective: plasticity, the enemy of the good

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