Leveraging Comparative Phylogenetics for Evolutionary Medicine: Applications to Comparative Oncology

Abstract

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 cross-species genomic and phenotypic data. To date, however, the majority of published studies have focused on classical questions in evolutionary biology, such as speciation and the ecological drivers of trait evolution. Here, we argue that evolutionary medicine in general, and our understanding of the origin and diversification of disease traits in particular, would be greatly expanded by a wider integration of phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs). We use comparative oncology - the study of cancer across the tree of life - as a case study to demonstrate the power of the approach and show that implementing PCMs can highlight the mode and tempo of the evolutionary changes in intrinsic, species-level disease vulnerabilities.