Tumor Evolution in Context with Christina Curtis

If one was going to be a cancer researcher, surely one would want to be Christina Curtis. She’s an associate professor of oncology and genetics at Stanford, and she studies tumor evolution. She’s the Darwin of cancer research. Because scientists can’t see human tumors evolve in real life, in Christina's lab she creates what she calls "virtual tumors that recapitulate the size and spatial properties of an actual tumor. And evaluating patient data,” she says, "we have found that metastatic seeding could happen very early. That these tumors were born to be bad.”