ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Peto's paradox and the promise of comparative oncology.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 83 citations in OpenAlex.
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- When cells rebel: a comparative genomics investigation into marsupial cancer susceptibility.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Do turtles get cancer?Bioscience · 2025Review
- Towards a more robust comparative oncology: a Bayesian reanalysis of Peto's paradox and discussion of comparative cancer risk studies in vertebrates.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- No evidence for Peto's paradox in terrestrial vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cancer Prevalence across Vertebrates.Cancer discovery · 2025Article
- When Do Tumours Develop? Neoplastic Processes Across Different Timescales: Age, Season and Round the Circadian Clock.Evolutionary applications · 2024Review
- Efficient semi-supervised semantic segmentation of electron microscopy cancer images with sparse annotations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Cancer Prevalence Across Vertebrates.Research square · 2023Article
- Bridging clinic and wildlife care with AI-powered pan-species computational pathology.Nature communications · 2023Article
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- Efficient semi-supervised semantic segmentation of electron microscopy cancer images with sparse annotations.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2023Article
- The value of broad taxonomic comparisons in evolutionary medicine: Disease is not a trait but aMedComm · 2022Article
- Comparative study of the evolution of cancer gene duplications across fish.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Cancer suppression and the evolution of multiple retrogene copies of TP53 in elephants: A re-evaluation.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Trade-off between reducing mutational accumulation and increasing commitment to differentiation determines tissue organization.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The One Medicine concept: its emergence from history as a systematic approach to re-integrate human and veterinary medicine.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2021Review
- On the need for integrating cancer into the One Health perspective.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The past several decades have seen a paradigm shift with the integration of evolutionary thinking into studying cancer. The evolutionary lens is most commonly employed in understanding cancer emergence, tumour growth and metastasis, but there is an increasing realization that cancer defences both between tissues within the individual and between species have been influenced by natural selection. This special issue focuses on discoveries of these deeper evolutionary phenomena in the emerging area of 'comparative oncology'. Comparing cancer dynamics in different tissues or species can lead to insights into how biology and ecology have led to differences in carcinogenesis, and the diversity, incidence and lethality of cancers. In this introduction to the special issue, we review the history of the field and outline how the contributions use empirical, comparative and theoretical approaches to address the processes and patterns associated with 'Peto's paradox', the lack of a statistical relationship of cancer incidence with body size and longevity. This burgeoning area of research can help us understand that cancer is not only a disease but is also a driving force in biological systems and species life histories. Comparative oncology will be key to understanding globally important health issues, including cancer epidemiology, prevention and improved therapies.
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