Research Interests
Professor Maley is a cancer biologist, evolutionary biologist and computational biologist, working at the intersection of those fields. His team applies evolutionary and ecological theory to three problems in cancer: (1) Neoplastic progression: the evolutionary dynamics among cells of a tumor that drive progression from normal tissue to malignant cancers, (2) Acquired therapeutic resistance: the evolutionary dynamics by which our therapies select for resistance and we fail to cure cancer, and (3) the evolution of cancer suppression mechanisms in large, long-lived animals like elephants and whales (a problem called Peto’s Paradox). They use genomic data mining, phylogenetics, computational modeling, as well as wet lab techniques to solve these problems. In all of this work, their goals are to develop better methods to prevent cancer and improve cancer management.