Many cancer drugs give only a few months of benefit to patients. The reason for this is the evolution of drug resistance in the cancer. In this session we will discuss how evolutionary thinking might be able to help improve the drug discovery process (Freddie Whiting), and how the idea of evolutionary steering to forestall the evolution of resistance is being tested in clinical trials (Michelle Lockley). We will argue that evolution causes cancer treatments to fail, but that evolutionary thinking represents a rich opportunity to rapidly improve our cancer treatments.
