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Cancer progression as a learning process
- Source :
- iScience, Vol 25, Iss 3, Pp 103924- (2022)
- Publication Year :
- 2022
- Publisher :
- Elsevier, 2022.
-
Abstract
- Summary: Drug resistance and metastasis—the major complications in cancer—both entail adaptation of cancer cells to stress, whether a drug or a lethal new environment. Intriguingly, these adaptive processes share similar features that cannot be explained by a pure Darwinian scheme, including dormancy, increased heterogeneity, and stress-induced plasticity. Here, we propose that learning theory offers a framework to explain these features and may shed light on these two intricate processes. In this framework, learning is performed at the single-cell level, by stress-driven exploratory trial-and-error. Such a process is not contingent on pre-existing pathways but on a random search for a state that diminishes the stress. We review underlying mechanisms that may support this search, and show by using a learning model that such exploratory learning is feasible in a high-dimensional system as the cell. At the population level, we view the tissue as a network of exploring agents that communicate, restraining cancer formation in health. In this view, disease results from the breakdown of homeostasis between cellular exploratory drive and tissue homeostasis.
- Subjects :
- Evolutionary theories
Cancer systems biology
Science
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 25890042
- Volume :
- 25
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- iScience
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.b366c978162416aafe3419d56c4f701
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.103924