Robert Gatenby

Robert A. Gatenby is an American physician-scientist, radiologist and professor at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, known for founding adaptive therapy and for treating cancer as a problem in the ecology and evolution of an evolving cell population.

Cancer as an ecological system

Gatenby’s research models tumors as ecosystems: populations of competing phenotypes coupled by resource competition, waste accumulation, and interactions with stromal and immune cells. His group used game-theoretic and dynamical systems models to show that the outcome of therapy is an ecological consequence of treatment: maximum-tolerance dosing imposes the strongest possible selection for resistant phenotypes, and the extinction of sensitive