Why is cancer not more common? A changing microenvironment may help to explain why, and suggests strategies for anti-cancer therapy.

ABSTRACT: One of the great unsolved puzzles in cancer biology is not why cancers occur, but rather explaining why so few cancers occur compared with the theoretical number that could occur, given the number of progenitor cells in the body and the normal mutation rate. We hypothesized that a contributory explanation is that the tumour microenvironment (TME) is not fixed due to factors such as immune cell infiltration, and that this could impair the ability of neoplastic cells to retain a high enough fitness to become a cancer. The TME has implicitly been assumed to be static in most cancer evolution models, and we therefore developed a mathematical model of spatial cancer evolution assuming that the TME, and thus the optimum cancer phenotype, changes over time. Based on simulations, we show how cance

SUBMITTER: Jiang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7241076 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature