Digital oncology, the dawn of a new era turning the clock back on tumor mass

Evolutionary path of cancer therapeutics which started around eighty-two years ago, following serendipitous discovery of nitrogen mustard 1 has been guided by an accelerated pace of new discoveries, an ever-increasing depth of understanding of intracellular biological processes 2 and application of advances made in other fields of science 3. Success in any field, especially in cancer medicine, is based on embracing evolution in understanding other scientific fields 4 and its application to the forward move in cancer therapeutics. As such, we have gone through discovery of a diverse group of therapeutics, targeting different sub compartments of growth and proliferation pathways 5 and taking advantage of their synergistic efficacy, in different combinations 6. Dissection of immune regulatory pathways 7 and their interaction with cancer cell has led to the generation of modern immune therapeutic agents. Single-cell sequencing technology 8 has paved the way for the development of spatial omics 9, which has opened the way on deeper understanding of tumor evolutionary path 10. This would give us the opportunity to design a new generation of cancer therapeutics 11 intercepting with the forward evolutionary path of tumor mass. Along this path, we face insurmountable barriers in developing meaningful and game changing treatment strategies by directing single changes in a hyper complex biological system 12, manifested by complexities of genome 13, epigenome 14, microRNA network 15, gene regulatory mechanisms 16, and protein-protein interactions 17. Consequently, we need to search for a solution that enables us to freeze or slow down the forward evolutionary path of tumor mass 18, by making a single change in a game changing variable of cancer cell.