The discovery of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes firmly established the view that "cancer is fundamentally a disease of genomic alteration" and that the rational approach and is to identify and target critical genetic alterations or particular pathways of tumor cell evolution. The success of Gleevec in the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) provided "proof of principle" and was used to justify the overarching strategy of the National Cancer Institute: identify and target the genetic alterations of cancer. However, there is overwhelming evidence that cancer is actually a hugely diverse, complex, unpredictable, non-linear, stochastic evolutionary process. This conclusion, if true, falsifies much of what is believed to be true of cancer and invalidates most approaches being pursued to develop treatments for cancer patients. However, it also opens up new vistas and therapeutic approaches.[ for more detail read the draft attached below ]

Comments, criticisms, attempted refutations, discussion, debate, and posting of evidence and arguments related to the this topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. -- Arny Glazier

• Cell Differentiation Patterns Suppress Somatic Evolution. J. W. Pepper, K. Sprouffske, and C. C. Maley. 2007.PloS Computational Biology 3(12):e250.
  
• Cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process, Lauren M.F. Merlo, John W. Pepper, Brian J. Reid and Carlo C. Maley, Nature Reviews (Dec 2006)
• Cancer genome sequencing: the challenges ahead, Henry Heng, BioEssays, Vol 29, Issue 8, Pages 783-794
• “Human Cancer Cells Express a Mutator Phenotype” by Bielas JH, Loeb KR, Rubin BP, True LD, Loeb LA. In Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Nov 28;103(48):18238-42
• Editorial on cancer and tumor cell evolution, A.Glazier with E. Frei III, A.C. Upton, L.A. Loeb, C. Webb, H. Pass, B. Crespi, M. Liebman, R. Somiari, H. Heng
  
• Cure Cancer Project website (beta)
• The aneuploidy theory of cancer and the barriers to its acceptance (David Rasnick, 2002)
• Why We're Losing the War on Cancer (Clifton Leaf, 2004, Fortune)
• Untangling the roots of cancer (Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, Oct 2004)
  
• Also see Prior Discussions.