This ecDNA sounds a lot like the tactics of viruses & prokaryotes, and supports my mental model of cancer as a sort of virtual organism within us, with a strategy of defecting from multicellularity. I imagine this niche has been fought with since the beginning of cells getting together, and cancer today represents billions of years of selection for that strategy.
marojejian•1h ago
Paper the story is based on: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(26)00278-3
This ecDNA sounds a lot like the tactics of viruses & prokaryotes, and supports my mental model of cancer as a sort of virtual organism within us, with a strategy of defecting from multicellularity. I imagine this niche has been fought with since the beginning of cells getting together, and cancer today represents billions of years of selection for that strategy.