In Silico Implementation of Paradigmatic Evolutionary Principles in Therapy Design: Resistant Cells as Prospective Inhibitors of Non-Efficient Therapies?

In here presented what-if analysis we substitute a unified therapy with a 'therapy species', which is the population of heterogeneous therapies evolving accordingly to evolutionary principles. Each therapy within the species may be, at any time, either free or in the exclusive complex with one cell. The therapy is allowed to create the complex with another cell only after its current host cell has died, playing the role of a catalyst. Regarding therapeutic context, the fitnesses of the therapies reflect their respective cytotoxicities in a way which conforms to evolutionary causation. Results of the minimalistic in silico modeling indicate that the resistant cells could bias the evolution of the therapies towards more toxic ones by inhibiting non-efficient therapies. In this way, not only therapies govern the evolution of different phenotypes, but variable resistances of cells govern the evolution of therapies as well. As the evolutionary causation of cancer drug resistance has been intensively studied for a few decades, we refer to cancer as a special case to illustrate purely theoretical analysis.