Scientists can use genetic “weather forecasting” to predict how long it will take for bowel cancer to evolve resistance to a drug before a patient has even started treatment, a new study suggests.
Using similar principles to those used in meteorology to predict which mutations might arise, and how they would undergo selection, researchers made long-range forecasts of how cancers might evolve drug resistance.
Knowing when drugs are likely to stop working could give clinicians more time to prepare for the next step in a person’s treatment, and to consider offering them alternative therapies or to enrol them in clinical trials.