Cancer Molecular Evolution

By far, the majority of studies in molecular evolution have focused on genetic change across one or more generations.Much less is known about the genetic changes that occur during the life time of an individual, or somatic evolution, of which cancer is probably the best-known example.Cancer is an adaptive evolutionary process in which distinct genetic clones compete for space and resources (Cairns 1975;Greaves and Maley 2012;Nowell 1976).Modern cancer biology and genomics have validated the evolutionary nature of cancer, which has attracted much attention in recent years (Burrell and Swanton 2014;Gerlinger et al. 2014).Not surprisingly, cancer genomics has unveiled a significant amount of intratumor heterogeneity in most tumor types (Burrell et al. 2013;Michor and Polyak 2010;Swanton 2012).However, but logically, most studies in cancer genomics have been mostly concerned with the identification of the genetic and epigenetic changes that lead to cell transformation, tumor growth, metastasis and drug resistance, and much less with molecular evolutionary aspects.Despite a relatively rich literature on cancer evolutionary dynamics (Michor et al. 2004;Sottoriva et al. 2011), little is known about the evolutionary mechanisms that drive tumor progression at the molecular and cellular level, and evolutionary insights in cancer are based, for the most part, on mathematical models of carcinogenesis (Beerenwinkel et al. 2015).Fortunately, the chance to obtain a more quantitative understanding of cancer molecular evolution is here.