The Approaching Darwinian Era in Oncology

Through most of medical history, treatments for metastatic cancers were ineffective, and rapid patient death was inevitable. Over the past five decades, a worldwide drug development effort has introduced a remarkable range of new cancer treatment strategies and agents so that virtually all metastatic cancers have one or more effective therapeutic options to prolong life. Yet most metastatic cancers remain fatal, and increasingly, the proximate cause of death is evolution. Local or systemic therapies applied to large, heterogeneous cancer populations elicit complex short- and long-term adaptive responses. Cells already possessing the molecular machinery of resistance obtain a stepwise fitness benefit relative to treatment-sensitive cells, allowing increased proliferation. Cells, otherwise sensitive to the treatment, may survive when in epigenetic states resistant to the treatment-induced death pathway or microenvironmental conditions that reduce drug delivery/efficacy, followed by a transition to "hard-wired" resistance allowing proliferation. These dynamics, enabled by the vast information content of the human genome, can produce diverse adaptive strategies in response to virtually all available treatments. Thus, oncology is rapidly approaching an era in which patient death is caused not by the absence of effective therapies but rather by eco-evolutionary dynamics that defeat initially successful treatments. Emerging evidence suggests that explicit integration of evolutionary principles to control or eliminate resistant populations can improve outcomes. In this issue of Cancer Research, Hockings and colleagues present an important evolutionary strategy to delay or prevent the evolution of resistance in ovarian cancer, with broad potential application. See related article by Hockings et al., p. 3503.