Most hallmarks of cancer involve the co-option of processes that are normally beneficial, such as wound-healing, vascularisation, and proliferative signalling into new contexts where they no longer self-attenuate. This conceptual link from developmental biology to cancer research generates the insight that where human development and physiology is dependent on those beneficial processes, then those processes are potentially co-optable by cancer.
Furthermore, natural selection acts more intensely on the early processes generating a viable individual capable of reproducing, than it does later in life. So the evolutionary forces that maintain early developmental processes needed for reproduction will be stronger than the forces that protect against cancerous co-option of those processes later in life.
Helpful for developing treatments?
Understanding is the first step in designing effective interventions, and this is where the existing wealth of fundamental knowledge about how these processes work can be deployed in service of cancer research.
Creating synergy between medical research and basic biological research was of course one of the goals behind the founding of the Francis Crick Institute, where I lead a research laboratory. My lab doesn’t study cancer directly but instead focuses on understanding how developmental processes have evolved.
This work intersects with cancer research at the level of concepts and principles, such as co-option, robustness of gene networks, and the adaptive pressures faced by different developmental stages. Engagement with concepts and principles like these is important for both clinical and basic research as it allows us to integrate information across seemingly unrelated areas, which is often a source of novel scientific ideas.
Yet engaging with concepts and principles can quickly become highly abstract and even philosophical. For example: how should we define co-option so that the concept captures interesting similarities across cancer biology and evolutionary biology? How is it that cancer occurrence can have explanations at multiple levels or scales? How should we understand the seemingly purposive and malevolent behaviours exhibited by cancer cells?
This is where my background in philosophy of science is useful for disentangling definitions and understanding the implications of the concepts we use. Combining conceptual thinking and hands-on research goes beyond what can be done with either approach separately, and facilitates integrating specialist knowledge into the big picture.
