Doctors are 'failing to understand the Darwinian evolution of cancer'
Published at 12:01AM, August 30 2014
Curing cancer is unrealistic because doctors and drug companies are helping the disease to adapt to treatment, a cancer expert says.
Mel Greaves, the director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research, says that doctors failed to understand the Darwinian evolution of the disease.
Each patient’s cancer evolves through natural selection into many forms in the “ecosystem” of the body, Professor Greaves said. “The patient doesn’t have one cancer. They have multiple cancers in many branches . . . all with a common ancestor.”
Thinking of cancer in this way was “a wake-up call and a reality check”, he said. Darwinian natural selection “explains why drug resistance almost always emerges in cancer. Oncologists unintentionally select for variants which are resistant to treatment.”
He said that drug companies made money from treatments that prolonged life briefly, but they had no incentive to find long-term solutions. “You’ve got to take a step sideways before you can go forwards,” he said. “Talk about a cure is just not very realistic . . . We should not try to eliminate the cancer, we should try to hold it in check.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/ne ... 191470.ece