Athena Aktipis

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1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

And that could be a mutation that actually just affects even the threshold for movement that the cells have.

So they can be more or less likely to move given a certain level of resources.

So once you have any mutation that affects movement or the likelihood of movement, then it's more likely to get selected because of the fact that

only the individuals who are leaving that depleted environment, yeah, and getting to a new place, even if it's nearby, right, that they're going to have a selective advantage.

And so, you know, so it really, it's not so much about overall the environment being depleted.

It's more sort of about the patchiness of the resources that, like, you know, if there are situations where, you know...

It could be really bad, you know, in one little area and then very close by.

It's good.

Then you can start getting the evolution of these motile phenotypes, which then once you have them has implications for sort of, you know, what's going to happen in the, you know, greater future.

system of the body and over the longer term.

So yeah, so the idea in this model that I made with some of my colleagues to explore this, our conclusion is basically that you can get the evolution of dispersal based on having sort of patchy resources and locally, at least in a small environment, lower resources.

And that this suggests that

You almost kind of might have like the pre-evolution of these cellular abilities, these adaptations for movement and for conditional movement that appear in a sort of different way later with metastasis.

But that there may be a sort of continuity there in terms of how –

how those abilities sort of start to evolve just in a local tumor environment before you see invasion, before you see things like metastasis.

Yeah, well, so the approach I think you're referring to is adaptive therapy, which was really kind of proposed and brought to the fore by Bob Gatenby from the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida.

And the main idea of this is that if you try to treat a cancer –

with high-dose therapy, with the approach of trying to eradicate it, you can inadvertently select for the cells that are most resistant to the therapy.

So this is akin to what happens with the evolution of resistance to pest control and... Antibiotics.

Yeah, yeah.

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