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Cancer therapy selects for cancer cells resistant to treatment, a process that is fundamentally evolutionary. To what extent, however, is the evolutionary perspective employed in research on therapeutic resistance and relapse? We analyzed 6,228 papers on therapeutic resistance and/or relapse

Cancer therapy selects for cancer cells resistant to treatment, a process that is fundamentally evolutionary. To what extent, however, is the evolutionary perspective employed in research on therapeutic resistance and relapse? We analyzed 6,228 papers on therapeutic resistance and/or relapse in cancers and found that the use of evolution terms in abstracts has remained at about 1% since the 1980s. However, detailed coding of 22 recent papers revealed a higher proportion of papers using evolutionary methods or evolutionary theory, although this number is still less than 10%. Despite the fact that relapse and therapeutic resistance is essentially an evolutionary process, it appears that this framework has not permeated research. This represents an unrealized opportunity for advances in research on therapeutic resistance.

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    Title
    • Overlooking Evolution: A Systematic Analysis of Cancer Relapse and Therapeutic Resistance Research
    Contributors
    Date Created
    2011-11-17
    Resource Type
  • Text
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    Identifier
    • Digital object identifier: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026100
    • Identifier Type
      International standard serial number
      Identifier Value
      1045-3830
    • Identifier Type
      International standard serial number
      Identifier Value
      1939-1560
    Note
    • The article is published at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026100

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    Aktipis, C. A., Kwan, V. S., Johnson, K. A., Neuberg, S. L., & Maley, C. C. (2011). Overlooking Evolution: A Systematic Analysis of Cancer Relapse and Therapeutic Resistance Research. PLoS ONE, 6(11). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026100

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