Managing Drug-Resistant Cancers : Darwin's Theory to the Rescue

Antimicrobial resistance is a major health threat that kills more than a million people each year.

- PT News

But cancer—a non-communicable disease—poses a much bigger challenge to global public health by killing ten times as many. The vast majority of those cancer deaths result from resistance to anti-cancer therapies, a phenomenon that mirrors the fatalities associated with antimicrobial resistance. A perspective shift in the way that the disease is treated, based on the theory of evolution, could change that. Each year, over 40 million people die from non-communicable diseases. Cancer is the second leading cause of death from non-communicable diseases after heart disease. Around 20 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer annually. Half of them will die from it. The odds are sobering: one in five of us will face a cancer diagnosis during our lifetime, and one in nine men and one in twelve women will die as a result, based on estimates from the Global Cancer Statistics 2020. The good news is that survival rates are climbing. Over the pa