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CANCER EVOLUTION

Resistance games

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 336–337 (2019)Cite this article

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A game theory study supported by in vitro experimental data shows that drug treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer cells causes the cells to switch between evolutionary games they play among each other. Moreover, the work calls into question standard assumptions on the fitness costs of drug resistance to cancer cells.

Originating from Von Neumann and Morgenstern1 in the 1950s, game theory has become the mathematical theory of decision making in situations where an individual entity’s outcome may depend not just on its own behaviour, but also on the behaviours of others. Initially, game theory focused on conflict and cooperation in economics and social sciences. In the 1970s, Maynard Smith and Price pioneered its application to evolutionary dynamics2, creating the field of evolutionary game theory (EGT). In EGT, players often inherit, rather than choose, their (proliferation and survival) strategies3, and of interest are the eco-evolutionary consequences of these inherited strategies. EGT of cancer emerged about 20 years ago4,5, allowing tumourigenesis to be studied in a manner in which cancer cells play an evolutionary game among each other, possibly with healthy cells as well. More recent works on EGT of cancer6,7,8,9 have focused on investigating whether (and how) the cancer evolutionary game could be altered by treatment choices so that a more desirable patient outcome is achieved. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Kaznatchev et al.10 have now applied EGT to study evolution of drug resistance in human non-small-cell lung cancer cells.

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References

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  1. Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands

    Kateřina Staňková

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  1. Kateřina Staňková
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Correspondence to Kateřina Staňková.

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Staňková, K. Resistance games. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 336–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0785-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0785-y

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