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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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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

Right.

So you can you can then approach it from this perspective of like, well, OK, given that it's going to stick around.

Right.

What are the priorities?

And so the approach of adaptive therapy is really that you start by giving a dose of the drug to kind of get the tumor to a smaller size so that it's a little bit more manageable.

And then you only treat it when it's growing.

And when it's not growing, you let it be.

And the idea here is that there's usually a cost to resistance to drugs because it takes energy for cells to pump out drugs from the cell or do other things that can confer resistance.

So that means that when you're not applying the drug, the cells that are sensitive to the treatment

are going to be more likely.

Yeah, they're going to have an advantage over the cells that are resistant.

And so, you know, you kind of manage the tumor by treating it when it's growing too much, and then you back off.

So then, you know, you can get more of the sensitive cells there.

And, you know, patients are able to live for much longer than...

expected with these these kinds of treatments when you know in the clinical trials that have been done there's it's it's there's ongoing work you know there's a lot more work to be done but the clinical trials that have been done are really promising you know even with late stage cancer.

Yeah, that's another one of the hypotheses that I have about what's going on with adaptive therapy, that it might not just be about allowing sensitive cells to grow back, but also that every time you treat a tumor conditional on it growing, you're going to be –

essentially able to target those cells that grow more because not only will there be more of them, but they're going to be more vulnerable because they're in that state of dividing and doing that life history trade-off of investing in the reproduction over the survival.

So yeah, there are a lot of potential mechanisms that could be underlying that.

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of efforts now to start clinical trials with adaptive therapy.

A lot of that has happened at the Moffitt Cancer Center, you know, where Bob Gatenby is, and he's developed a lot of collaborations there.

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