Cancer: A New Game?
A recent study offered a new perspective to cancer, potentially revolutionizing the effectiveness and feasibility of cancer treatments. The danger and incurability of cancer itself is in part due to evolutionary game theory, in which malignant cells are prone to evolving resistance, making it more likely for the cancer to spread with neighboring cells. As such, the dynamics of resistance and its effects on cancerous and neighboring cells are neglected in the context of cancer treatments. Instead, this study presented cancer treatment as a game between the implemented therapy and the resistance strategies of cancerous cells. In this game, the physician is able to make conscious decisions, while the cancer cells act upon their surroundings such that they can only respond and change depending on the physician’s actions. Patterns in these “asymmetries” can provide useful information in how to execute treatments more effectively as opposed to the typical fixed strategy of consistently using the same drugs until the tumor diminishes.
In order to yield results not in Nash equilibrium to initiate change altering cancer outcomes, physicians can exploit asymmetries within the game to optimize cancer treatments by better managing amounts and timing of administering treatments. Thus, physicians seek to find an evolutionarily stable strategy in which only a small fraction of cancer cells act resistantly to the physician’s treatment, so that the physician’s payoff is greater than that of the cancer cells. In this way, physicians can better analyze and predict the response and adaptation of cancer cells to different treatments. However, this game generates greater limitations beyond nature for the physician, including money, resources, etc. Overall, the applications of evolutionary game theory can simulate data used towards optimizing cancer treatments in which could change the blocks in curing cancer and high chances of relapse.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2696342