Pancreatic cancer viewed through the eyes of Charles Darwin

The pancreatic cancer research team here at Hopkins just published a thought provoking review on how evolutionary principles can help us understand pancreatic cancer better. This review, published in the journal Cancer and Metastasis Reviews, is available on-line (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10555-020-09953-z.pdf). The authors first review the ways in which evolutionary principles can help us understand why human beings get cancer to begin with, why pancreatic cancer runs in some families, and why the immune system doesn’t kill all cancers. The authors then delve into a series “thought provoking questions,” meant to stimulate physicians and scientists into thinking about how evolutionary principles can help us understand the drivers of this terrible disease.
We hope you enjoy it and that it provokes new ideas that will help fight pancreatic cancer!