Athena Aktipis

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

There's – we have some efforts going on here as well to test adaptive therapy in some mouse models, but also trying to actually start some clinical trials with breast cancer patients.

But there's – unfortunately, there –

There aren't a lot of like economic interests in the private sector that are aligned with adaptive therapy because, you know, there's not the idea of giving someone less medicine.

Yeah, and it's an algorithm, right, for treatment.

It can be used with any drug or approach, really.

I mean, you have to sort of figure out how to use it, but it's an idea that can be computationally instantiated and might be a little different in different systems.

So it really relies on having funding from...

you know, agencies, NIH and, well, actually NCI, National Cancer Institute, which it's, you know, within there.

But, you know, there's a, and there, I mean, there is funding that is happening.

There are, you know, clinical trials going on, but it's, there need to be more, you know, and there, we need to think about, you know, how can we facilitate, you know, these, these kinds of approaches that frankly are,

They're cheaper, they're easier on patients and they're probably I mean, not probably, they're definitely a lot more exportable to countries where really expensive chemo, you know, with intense monitoring and testing and all of that isn't as much of an option.

So I think there's a real, real opportunity to, you know,

to think about how we can take these sorts of approaches to bring at least, you know, some management of cancer to places where, you know, expensive methods and drugs are just not an option.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it's obviously something that, you know, like...

There are caveats there, right?

Like maybe you would want to be feeding it and then treating it with adaptive therapy, for example, right?

But if you're feeding it, then you're reducing the selection pressures on the cells to disperse, which if you're trying to prevent the evolution of invasion and metastasis, could be a good strategy.

So yeah, if you start applying these ideas from...

ecology, like dispersal theory, and, you know, theories like life history theory, and, you know, thinking about, you know, how do we affect the parameters of natural selection, you think of all of these things, it opens up this, this creative space for thinking about new strategies for controlling cancer, and then, you know, potentially combining them in ways that, you know, allow you to

Showing 601–620 of 1,334 · page 31 of 67