Cancer and intercellular cooperation

Cancer and intercellular cooperation

The major transitions approach in evolutionary biology has shown that the intercellular cooperation that characterizes multicellular organisms would never have emerged without some kind of multilevel selection. Relying on this view, the Evolutionary Somatic view of cancer considers cancer as a breakdown of intercellular cooperation and as a loss of the balance between selection processes that t...

Cooperation between cancer cells

Cancer cells secrete growth factors that induce proliferation, protect against apoptosis and the immune system or promote neo-angiogenesis [1]. As they are diffusible (Fig. 1), the growth factors produced by a cell can be used by other neighbouring cells, an example of cooperation among cancer cells [2]. A conceptual problem arises: a non-producer cell can exploit the growth factors secreted by...

Targeting Intercellular Communication in Cancer Gene Therapy

I. Cooperation among Cancer Cells

spheres to represent individual cells in a solid tumor. The model calculates chemical gradients and determines the dynamics of the tumor as emergent properties of the interactions between the cells. As an example, we present an investigation of cooperation among cancer cells where cooperators secrete a growth factor that is costly to synthesize. Simulations reveal that cooperation is favored wh...

Global cooperation in gynecologic cancer.