Friday, August 28, 2026

Cancer is quantum



Being a cancer survivor, this post from Medicalexpress piqued my interest as it seems cancer is quantum, it exists in a limited number of states, hence, a new way to deal with this condition without poisons and surgery may be at hand. One can only hope.

Andrea Califano began his career as a physicist. But that's not why he's now calling cancer a quantum disease. "We're really just following the data," says Califano, the Clyde '56 and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and head of Biohub, New York.

"What we've seen over and over again is that each type of cancer has a limited number of cellular states. Just as electrons are restricted to a limited number of quantized energy states in an atom, cancer cells can only occupy one of these stable states or be in rapid transit between them. More critically, these states are conserved across virtually all patients with a specific type of cancer."

The newest findings from the Califano lab—published recently in two papers in Nature Genetics—add critical evidence in support of the concept, which has enormous potential to transform and simplify the treatment of almost all cancers.

"If cancer is quantum, the good news is that we may not need personalized medicine," Califano says. "A combination of therapies targeting the handful of distinct, detectable states may be all that is needed, and those combinations should be effective for virtually every patient."

Click here for the paper.

Nature"s lazy buy you already know that, right?

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