One of the intriguing aspects of cancer metabolism is the significance of the Warburg effect and its role in driving the cancer phenotype – a subject with a long and contentious history. We shall try to link the Warburg effect to the deep evolutionary roots of cancer as part of the hypothesis that cancer is a default to an ancestral phenotype, and that oxygenic glycolysis represents an ancestral mode of metabolism.

This Workshop will focus on understanding the nature of cancer in terms of the flow and control of information, and the activities of various regulatory and signaling networks in a systems context. Topics will include GRNs, network theory applied to signaling pathways, chromosomal reorganization, systems biology, attractors, epigenetic landscapes, and thermodynamic and information theoretic aspects of stressed biosystems.

Cancer cells often remain quiescent for years of even decades. This fundamental, and still mysterious, property of cancer is the subject of the next workshop. Latency refers to the fact that cancer cells, or even small tumors of the sort that are detected in screening programs, may never progress to cause clinical symptoms. Dormancy describes the well-known phenomenon that, following the removal of a primary tumor, the same cancer may reappear years later in a more malignant form.