Embracing the complexity of cancer: a virtual collaboration event
I’ve been reading about complexity lately.
I resisted for a while, put off by certain heated, theatrical debates on LinkedIn.
But then one of my wonderful readers challenged me to give complexity theory a chance, and sent me some resources. At roughly the same time, I was talking to amazing people from the Cancer Patient Lab about their experience with genomic sequencing, and what this taught them about genetic variation in tumours.
Then it hit me! As a previous cancer research scientist and student of genetics, I was trained to look at cancer as a disease of genomic alterations. Later, as a communications consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, I began to revere the ‘holy grail’ of oncology drug development: the driver mutation that promotes cancer development.
But that’s only part of the story.
Cancer is more than that! It is a complex adaptive system in which genomic alterations are intertwined with continuous evolution in time and space.
I wrote about this in my previous blog post : Looking for the missing pieces in the cancer puzzle.
