Genetic Progression and the Waiting Time to Cancer

By Niko Beerenwinkel, T. Antal, D. Dingli, Arne Traulsen, Kenneth W. Kinzler, Victor E. Velculescu, Bert Vogelstein, Martin A. Nowak. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2007

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cancer results from genetic alterations that disturb the normal cooperative behavior of cells. Recent high-throughput genomic studies of cancer cells have shown that the mutational landscape of cancer is complex and that individual cancers may evolve through mutations in as many as 20 different cancer-associated genes. We use data published by Sjöblom et al. (2006) to develop a new mathematical model for the somatic evolution of colorectal cancers. We employ the Wright-Fisher process for exploring the basic parameters of this evolutionary process and derive an analytical approximation for the expected waiting time to the cancer phenotype. Our results highlight the relative importance of selection over both the size of the cell population at risk and the mutation rate. The model predicts that the observed genetic diversity of cancer genomes can arise under a normal mutation rate if the average selective advantage per mutation is on the order of 1%. Increased mutation rates due to genetic instability would allow even smaller selective advantages during tumorigenesis. The complexity of cancer progression can be understood as the result of multiple sequential mutations, each of which has a relatively small but positive effect on net cell growth.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Genetics, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7db548d9db74f64ccecb028e3f2fa3bd386bf1cf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cancer Research

  1. Bert Vogelstein
  2. Kenneth W. Kinzler
  3. Niko Beerenwinkel
  4. Moritz Gerstung
  5. Hannah Carter
  6. A. Bardelli
  7. L. Diaz

In Genetics

  1. Martin A. Nowak
  2. Niko Beerenwinkel
  3. Moritz Gerstung
  4. Florian Markowetz
  5. Roland F. Schwarz
  6. Su-Chan Park
  7. Jason Schweinsberg
  8. Bert Vogelstein

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