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.