Zachary Compton

*NEW PAPER*

The comparative method is one of the most powerful tools we have.

Here, we use comparative oncology to show how it can be applied to evolutionary medicine.

Now out in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.
academic.oup.com/emph/arti

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Evolution Melvyn Bragg examines the future of gene therapy and advances in evolutionary biology.

Fun episode BBC In Our Time episode from 1999 with John Maynard Smith.

Talks about the major transitions, the gene's-eye view, and why he's bored with human genome project.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Mayr and Lack standing outside wearing academic gowns.

Ernst Mayr and David Lack in Oxford 1966.

At #ESEB2025 Lisa Abbeglin presents data from the recent Cancer Prevalence across Vertebrates paper led by @zacharytcompton.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1158/2159...

Advancing cancer research via comparative oncology - Nature Reviews Cancer Comparative oncology combines evolutionary biology, ecology, veterinary medicine and clinical oncology to better understand cancer, for example, by identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms un...

Enjoyed this @natrevcancer.nature.com article on comparative oncology - how we can learn from other species 🐘🐋🦜🐍 about ways to prevent (& possibly treat) cancer. Both a review and a call to action for the research community. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @atjcagan.bsky.social @cmaley.bsky.social

Just a few days left to apply for the Fall 2025 cohort of the
Arizona Cancer Evolution Center Scholars program. Great training in comparative oncology, cancer evolution, and science communication! Open to all, not just Arizona State students.

And their reply to our reply. I enjoyed their title. I propose that all future papers referring to Peto's Paradox must have a title playing on the word "paradoxical" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Paradoxical indeed | PNAS Paradoxical indeed

Our reply to Butler et al's recent @pnas.org paper on Peto's Paradox. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Jeffrey Townsend (that's me!) presents on dismantling the coarse approximation of drivers and passengers in cancer at #AACR25.

Thank you @nlbigas.bsky.social for the photo!

"we demonstrate that a dog transmissible cancer has taken up and incorporated a large piece of DNA by horizontal transfer. This may have occurred through engulfment of fragments of a dying cell. Cancer is therefore not always entirely clonal"

Dream team. Looking forward to our next project

What kind of conclusions can we draw from comparative oncology?

Zach has thought more about that issue than most and this was a really fun paper to work on together.

The Elephant and the Spandrel Abstract. Comparative oncology has made great strides in identifying patterns of cancer prevalence and risk across the tree of life. Such studies have ofte

Is cancer suppression in and of itself an adaptation? The full version of our The Elephant & the Spandrel is now online. academic.oup.com/emph/article...

Flyer for the symposium

Beata Ujvari, Andriy Marusyk and Aurora Nedelcu are organising a symposium on “Cancer in an evolutionary framework: across species and within individuals” at the @eseb2025.bsky.social conference in Barcelona this August. Abstact submission closes on Friday: eseb2025.com/call-for-abs...

Deriving Optimal Treatment Timing for Adaptive Therapy: Matching the Model to the Tumor Dynamics Adaptive therapy (AT) protocols have been introduced to combat drug-resistance in cancer, and are characterized by breaks in maximum tolerated dose treatment (the current standard of care in most clin...

Chasing Perfection - previous work to optimize adaptive therapy schedules for cancer rely on monitoring the patient continuously. We find that accounting for discrete clinical appointments across multiple tumor models motivates patient-specific personalization in optimal tx!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Peto’s Paradox: How Gigantic Species Evolved to Beat Cancer Scientists dive into the genomes of whales, elephants, and other animal giants looking for new weapons in the fight against cancer.

Great interviews with so many awesome collaborators. One takeaway that is relevant given recent studies: Even if larger animals do in fact get more cancer, it does not falsify Peto’s Paradox. Large animals do not get orders of magnitude more cancer. www.the-scientist.com/peto-s-parad...

New study on diet, plasma glucose, and cancer prevalence across vertebrates published in Nature communications (@naturecomms.bsky.social) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One more day to submit abstracts for ISEMPH talks! I am looking forward to hosting a symposium "The Future of Comparative Oncology" that will be paired with @evo-eco-onco.bsky.social's cancer evolution session.

Leveraging Comparative Phylogenetics for Evolutionary Medicine: Applications to Comparative Oncology Comparative phylogenetics provides a wealth of computational tools to understand evolutionary processes and their outcomes. Advances in these methodologies have occurred in parallel with a surge in cr...

Reading Liam Revell & Luke Harmon's books on comparative phylogenetics, our team knew there would be important applications to comparative oncology --and the broader evolutionary medicine field. We explore these applications in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Leveraging Comparative Phylogenetics for Evolutionary Medicine: Applications to Comparative Oncology https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.11.637459v1

Walker Mellon getting ready to discuss some of the new comparative oncology projects we are focusing on this year! #SACB2025

Thank you all for the suggestions, I compiled them all here for the time being (might try to make something more stable than a google doc later), in case it is useful for anyone else: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

In the meantime, I will keep editing with new resources and recommendations!

The January issue of Cancer Discovery is now online! The cover features "Cancer Prevalance across Vertebrates" by @zacharytcompton.bsky.social and colleagues - read that and much more: aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

Thanks, @zacharytcompton.bsky.social! It was fun to write—and glad to see your paper officially out, and with the cool cover!

Peto’s Paradox Is Dead. Long Live Peto’s Paradox Summary:. In this issue, Compton and colleagues report the prevalence of neoplasia and malignant cancer in 292 species, based on 16,049 necropsy records, shedding light on susceptibility to cancer and...

@metzgerm.bsky.social wrote a wonderful Spotlight piece that accompanies the publication of our Cancer Discovery cover this morning. He highlights that our work opens as many exciting questions as it attempts to answer. aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

Next week I kick off the semester of Cancer Prevention & Control seminars! I will recap findings from our recent Cancer Discovery publication and focus on the exciting future research that needs to be done in comparative oncology

Resistance Management for Cancer: Lessons from Farmers Abstract. One of the main reasons we have not been able to cure cancers is that treatments select for drug-resistant cells. Pest managers face similar challenges with pesticides selecting for pesticid...

We just published a review of lessons farmers have learned for how to control pesticide resistance from evolving, and how to apply those to oncology to prevent cancers from evolving therapeutic resistance: bit.ly/48OfFdX

Phylogenetic tree highlighting species with exceptionally low cancer risk.

Big new comparative oncology paper! Zachary Compton and a large multi-institutional team analysed 16,049 necropsy records for 292 species spanning three clades of tetrapods to identify species with exceptionally high or low cancer prevalence. Free to read at doi.org/10.1158/2159...