TY - JOUR
T1 - Natural selection in cancer biology
T2 - From molecular snowflakes to trait hallmarks
AU - Fortunato, Angelo
AU - Boddy, Amy
AU - Mallo, Diego
AU - Aktipis, C Athena
AU - Maley, Carlo
AU - Pepper, John W.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank AlexMay for help in generating Figure 2, and Marc Tollis for pointing us to the literature on retrotransposons. This work is supported in part by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grants P01 CA91955, R01 CA149566, R01 CA170595, R01 CA185138, and R01 CA140657, as well as CDMRP Breast Cancer Research Program Award BC132057. J.W.P is supported as an employee of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The findings, opinions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the universities where the research was performed or the NIH.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/2
Y1 - 2017/2
N2 - Evolution by natural selection is the conceptual foundation for nearly every branch of biology and increasingly also for biomedicine and medical research. In cancer biology, evolution explains how populations of cells in tumors change over time. It is a fundamental question whether this evolutionary process is driven primarily by natural selection and adaptation or by other evolutionary processes such as founder effects and drift. In cancer biology, as in organismal evolutionary biology, there is controversy about this question and also about the use of adaptation through natural selection as a guiding framework for research. In this review, we discuss the differences and similarities between evolution among somatic cells versus evolution among organisms. We review what is known about the parameters and rate of evolution in neoplasms, aswell as evidence for adaptation. We conclude that adaptation is a useful framework that accurately explains the defining characteristics of cancer. Further, convergent evolution through natural selection provides the only satisfying explanation both for howa group of diverse pathologies have enough in common to usefully share the descriptive label of “cancer” and for why this convergent condition becomes lifethreatening.
AB - Evolution by natural selection is the conceptual foundation for nearly every branch of biology and increasingly also for biomedicine and medical research. In cancer biology, evolution explains how populations of cells in tumors change over time. It is a fundamental question whether this evolutionary process is driven primarily by natural selection and adaptation or by other evolutionary processes such as founder effects and drift. In cancer biology, as in organismal evolutionary biology, there is controversy about this question and also about the use of adaptation through natural selection as a guiding framework for research. In this review, we discuss the differences and similarities between evolution among somatic cells versus evolution among organisms. We review what is known about the parameters and rate of evolution in neoplasms, aswell as evidence for adaptation. We conclude that adaptation is a useful framework that accurately explains the defining characteristics of cancer. Further, convergent evolution through natural selection provides the only satisfying explanation both for howa group of diverse pathologies have enough in common to usefully share the descriptive label of “cancer” and for why this convergent condition becomes lifethreatening.
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U2 - 10.1101/cshperspect.a029652
DO - 10.1101/cshperspect.a029652
M3 - Article
C2 - 28148564
AN - SCOPUS:85011554837
VL - 7
JO - Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine
JF - Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine
SN - 2157-1422
IS - 2
M1 - a029652
ER -