Redundancy: a critical obstacle to improving cancer therapy

A system characterized by redundancy has various elements that are able to act in the same biologic or dynamic manner, where the inhibition of one of those elements has no significant effect on the global biologic outcome or on the system's dynamic behavior. Methods that aim to predict the effectiveness of cancer therapies must include evolutionary and dynamic features that would change the static view that is widely accepted. Here, we explore several important issues about mechanisms of redundancy, heterogeneity, biologic importance, and drug resistance and describe methodologic challenges that, if overcome, would significantly contribute to cancer research.