Harnessing phenotypic heterogeneity to design better therapies

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Unlike many of the IAS lectures I’ve recently blogged this one is a new lecture – it was uploaded earlier this week. I have to say that I was very surprised – and disappointed – that the treatment strategy discussed in the lecture had not already been analyzed in a lot of detail and been implemented in clinical practice for some time. Why would you not expect the composition of cancer cell subtypes in the tumour microenvironment to change when you start treatment – in any setting where a subgroup of cancer cells has a different level of responsiveness to treatment than ‘the average’, that would to me seem to be the expected outcome. And concepts such as drug holidays and dose adjustments as treatment responses to evolving drug resistance/treatment failure seem like such obvious approaches to try out here (…the immunologists dealing with HIV infection have been studying such things for decades). I guess ‘better late than never’.

A few papers mentioned/discussed in the lecture:

Impact of Metabolic Heterogeneity on Tumor Growth, Invasion, and Treatment Outcomes.
Adaptive vs continuous cancer therapy: Exploiting space and trade-offs in drug scheduling.
Exploiting evolutionary principles to prolong tumor control in preclinical models of breast cancer.