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Here, the authors find that mammals with more diverse immune genes (MHC I) face lower cancer risk, suggesting that immune surveillance could be a widespread natural defense against cancer.

Analysis of the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, reveals an improved ability to repair DNA breaks, mediated by high levels of cold-inducible RNA-binding protein.   

This study nominates immune escape as an early event in colorectal cancer and shows how this can be driven through both genetic and epigenetic changes.

Factors controlling cancer and neoplasia prevalence across species are unclear. Here, the authors investigate the impact of diet and plasma glucose levels across 273 vertebrate species, finding no association between glucose levels and cancer within birds, mammals, or reptiles.

Based on a consensus conference of experts in the evolution and ecology of cancer, this article proposes a framework for classifying tumours that includes four evolutionary and ecological processes: neoplastic cell diversity and changes over time in that diversity, hazards to cell survival and available resources.

Clonal dynamics of Barrett’s esophagus (BE) leading to cancer are poorly understood. Here, they report BE segments are clonal, have frequent mutations at the gastro-esophageal junction, genomic instability precedes genome doubling/clonal expansion, and a correlation between inter- and intra-biopsy genetic diversity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential of assisting the study and diagnosis of veterinary cancers. Here, the authors build a cancer digital pathology atlas encompassing multiple animal species and demonstrate an AI approach for comparative pathology, which yields insights about immune response and morphological similarities.

Barrett’s oesophagus is thought to be a precursor lesion for oesophageal cancer, and predicting the benign lesions that progress to cancer is clinically important. Here, the authors use FISH to study the clonal evolution of Barrett’s oesophagus and show that genetic diversity and somatic mutations are present early in the benign disease.

An analysis of whole-genome sequencing data from patients with Barrett’s oesophagus or oesophageal ademocarcinoma shows that extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) is strongly associated with cancer progression, and that a wide range of oncogenes are amplified on ecDNAs.

Tracking tumour evolution in a patient via circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) is complicated due to the unknown mix of fragmented alleles from different cancer lesions. Here, the authors make use of a rapid autopsy program to demonstrate how representative ctDNA profiling is of metastasis, as well as presenting methylation profiling method to track evolutionary change.

Invasion is a critical step in tumor development. Here, in colorectal cancer, the authors show that multiclonal invasion of the muscularis mucosae is pervasive, suggesting that invasive capacity is not a significant bottleneck in the evolution of the disease.

An analysis of cancer mortality data for zoo mammals highlights marked differences across mammalian orders and an influence of diet, and shows that mortality risk is largely independent of body mass and life expectancy across species.

Clonal evolution is now a central theoretical framework in cancer research. In this Perspective, Laplane and Maley identify challenges to that theory such that some non-evolutionary phenomena in cancer cannot be captured by the theory. They also outline how other challenges, including non-genetic heredity, phenotypic plasticity, reticulate evolution and clone diversity, can be included in an expanded cancer evolutionary theory.

A genomic analysis of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) samples with matched ipsilateral invasive breast cancer recurring later shows that around 18% of tumors were unrelated to the DCIS, and had distinct clonal origins.

Barrett’s esophagus is a pre-malignant condition that can progress to esophageal cancer. Here, the authors carry out whole genome sequencing of samples from patients who did or did not progress to cancer and find that mutations in many genes occur regardless of progression status, but also find features associated with progressive disease.

The authors analyze the extent of intratumor heterogeneity across 12 tumor types to reveal that increased heterogeneity is a general phenomenon and has a biphasic contribution to tumor progression.

Evolutionary steering uses therapies to control tumour evolution by exploiting trade-offs. Here, using a barcoding approach applied to large cell populations, the authors explore evolutionary steering in lung cancer cells treated with EGFR inhibitors.

Neoplasms are microcosms of evolution. The evolution of neoplastic cells explains why we get cancer and why it has been so difficult to cure. Can evolutionary biology provide new insights into the clinical control of cancer?

Comparative oncology combines evolutionary biology, ecology, veterinary medicine and clinical oncology to better understand cancer, for example, by identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the remarkable cancer resistance of some taxa. Therefore, this Perspective by Vincze et al. calls for the increased use of non-conventional model organisms in cancer research to advance cancer prevention and treatment strategies.

The evolutionary biology of cancers and organismal species are similar: in both cases, a genetically diverse population mutates and evolves through natural selection. In addition, driving both species and cancers to extinction is extremely difficult. Nevertheless, greater than 99.9% of species that have lived on Earth are now extinct, and the parallels between tumours and organismal evolution suggest that understanding species extinction through paleontology could teach us much about how to eradicate cancers. In this Review, the selective pressures that have driven species extinct and the characteristics of species that make them resistant to extinction are described, and how these factors can be translated to cancers in order to develop improved approaches to therapy and prognosis is discussed.

Evolutionary life history theory posits that some organisms reproduce rapidly whereas others invest more resources in survival. This framework might help us to understand the diversity of phenotypes that are displayed by tumour cells, including stem cell-like phenotypes, and could have important clinical implications.

The imminent release of tissue atlases combining multichannel microscopy with single-cell sequencing and other omics data from normal and diseased specimens creates an urgent need for data and metadata standards to guide data deposition, curation and release. We describe a Minimum Information about Highly Multiplexed Tissue Imaging (MITI) standard that applies best practices developed for genomics and for other microscopy data to highly multiplexed tissue images and traditional histology.