The Evolutionary Ecology of Cancer: How Natural Selection Drives Proliferation and Angiogenesis

Natural selection operates at a variety of levels to determine patterns of cancer incidence among and within species, carcinogenesis, pathogenesis and patterns of treatment failure. This fact has motivated the emergence of evolutionary oncology, an interdisciplinary field contributing to clinical and basic oncology, cell and systems biology, evolutionary biology, ecology, mathematics and computational biology. Here I review two recent, interrelated developments in this field. The first is an evolutionary study of angiogenesis using the mathematical techniques of adaptive dynamics that predicts development of tumors-growing-on-tumors in a form of evolutionary suicide. The second is an ecological study of resource ratio theory applied to oncology. Experimental measurements suggest that tumors can be classified into two categories based on their phosphorus (P) concentrations: high P and low P. A well-established theory in ecology, supported by modeling results, suggests that high P tumors should arise in tissues with high cell turnover because such environments select for high proliferative potential, whereas low P tumors are favored in more stable tissues. I describe experiments distilled from modeling results that could be used to test this prediction.