# Leveraging comparative phylogenetics for evolutionary medicine: applications to comparative oncology

## TL;DR

This paper shows how evolutionary biology tools can help understand disease origins, using cancer as an example across species.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the use of phylogenetic comparative methods in evolutionary medicine, particularly for studying disease evolution.

## Key findings

- Phylogenetic comparative methods can reveal how disease vulnerabilities evolve across species.
- Comparative oncology benefits from these methods by showing evolutionary patterns in cancer traits.
- The approach highlights the tempo and mode of evolutionary changes in disease traits.

## 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 an example 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.