{"id":243332,"date":"2026-08-28T17:09:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/cancer-is-quantum-studies-show-cancer-cells-may-occupy-limited-shared-states-like-quantized-energy-levels"},"modified":"2026-08-28T17:09:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:09:11","slug":"cancer-is-quantum-studies-show-cancer-cells-may-occupy-limited-shared-states-like-quantized-energy-levels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/cancer-is-quantum-studies-show-cancer-cells-may-occupy-limited-shared-states-like-quantized-energy-levels","title":{"rendered":"Cancer is quantum: Studies show cancer cells may occupy limited, shared states like quantized energy levels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cancer-is-quantum-studies-show-cancer-cells-may-occupy-limited-shared-states-like-quantized-energy-levels.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Andrea Califano began his career as a physicist. But that\u2019s not why he\u2019s now calling cancer a quantum disease. \u201cWe\u2019re really just following the data,\u201d says Califano, the Clyde \u201856 and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and head of Biohub, New York.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The newest findings from the Califano lab\u2014published recently in two papers in <i>Nature Genetics <\/i>\u2014add critical evidence in support of the concept, which has enormous potential to transform and simplify the treatment of almost all cancers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrea Califano began his career as a physicist. But that\u2019s not why he\u2019s now calling cancer a quantum disease. \u201cWe\u2019re really just following the data,\u201d says Califano, the Clyde \u201856 and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and head of Biohub, New York. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}