Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
– Th. Dobzhansky, 1973
Dobzhansky’s astute observation is the truism for most of the medicine today. In case of cancer, we go a step further. Development of cancer makes sense in the light of ecology. The evolution of cancerous cells from healthy cells and further development of the cancerous cells into drug-resistant cells through somatic mutations depend on environment in which cancer cell resides and the epigenetic influences it experiences.
The ecology of cancer cells also contains healthy cells. Most chemotherapy drugs fail to discriminate between cancer and healthy cells. Often cancer cells are resistant to chemotherapies and healthy cells are destroyed. Targeted therapies target some cancer cells but not all of them. Under the onslaught of these types of drugs, an evolutionary selection pressure is exerted on cancer cells to evolve through somatic mutations to new cancer cells which become resistant to the therapies and cancer progresses.
Treatment of cancer, thus, needs to reduce the population of cancer cells while maintaining or increasing the population of healthy cells. To do this, we need a multi-agent, multi-targeting drug that can arrest molecularly diverse cancer cells and alleviate the selection pressure in order to prevent somatic mutation of cancer cells responsible for progression and recurrence of cancer. Aveta Biomics, through its insights in evolutionary biology, designs first-in-class drugs comprising of a rational combination of multifunctional botanical molecules called Orthologous Metabolite Structures (OMS) that can address diversity of tumor ecology and control the evolutionary trajectory of the tumor cells