Resistance Management for Cancer: Lessons from Farmers
Preventing cancer cells becoming resistant to treatment drugs is one of the trickiest problems facing oncologists, yet farmers have worked out ways to manage an analogous problem - controlling the development of resistance to chemicals by the pests in their fields. In...
Testing Adaptive Therapy Protocols Using Gemcitabine and Capecitabine in a Preclinical Model of Endocrine-Resistant Breast Cancer
The biggest obstacle to curing cancer is the fact that cancers often harbor resistant cells that are unaffected by cancer drugs. A team that includes several ACE researchers tested a new strategy, called adaptive therapy, for maintaining control over resistant cells...
Elephant TP53-RETROGENE 9 induces transcription-independent apoptosis at the mitochondria
Cancer in elephants is very rare, and in order to understand just how they are protected from the disease despite their size and long lifespan, a team including ACE researchers studied their TP-53 genes. Their results appeared in Nature, Cell Death Discovery in...
Is chimerism associated with cancer across the tree of life?
In this intriguing paper published in PLOS ONE in June 2023, ACE researchers and their colleagues studied the association between chimerism and cancer across the tree of life. A chimera is an organism has that has cells from two or more genetically distinct sources. ...
The evolutionary theory of cancer: challenges and potential solutions
In this Perspective article in Nature Reviews Cancer, Carlo Maley and his colleague, Lucie Laplane, point out that there is much yet to understand about the many theories and models of cancer evolution in order to discover the best way to treat and prevent the...
Cells eating other Cells – found across the tree of life!
In this fascinating study in Scientific Reports, ACE researchers, Stefania Kapsetaki (now at Tufts University), Luis H. Cisneros and Carlo Maley trawled the literature to discover that cell-on-cell cannibalism is a behavior that occurs in both cancer cells and normal...
Birds species that lay more eggs get more cancer
Bird species that have small clutches tend to get less cancer than species that have large clutches. That's the conclusion of an international team of scientists that includes several ACE researchers. The team studied the necropsy records of close to 6000 birds...
Reuniting philosophy and science to advance cancer research
The use of philosophical methods to pin down definitions and conceptualizations in cancer research could help sort out the wooly thinking that is pervasive in the subject and help scientists from different disciplines to better collaborate, argues a discussion paper...
ACE Scholars Program – a Big Success!
We are so proud of our ACE Scholars! They are undergraduates in many disciplines who come from all around the nation to help us understand the evolution and control of cancer. The students devote hours each week to the program, working individually and then meeting ...
The need for evolutionary theory in cancer research
This easy to read article by ACE's Amy M. Boddy, just published in European Journal of Epidemiology (2022), argues that even if we could understand all the mechanisms for cells to turn cancerous, it wouldn't be enough to help us treat and avoid the disease. For...