Aguadé Gorgorió, Guim, 1991-Costa, JoséSolé Vicente, Ricard, 1962-2023-05-172023-05-172023Aguadé‐Gorgorió G, Costa J, Solé R. An oncospace for human cancers. Bioessays. 2023 May;45(5):e2200215. DOI: 10.1002/bies.2022002150265-9247http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56843Human cancers comprise an heterogeneous array of diseases with different progression patterns and responses to therapy. However, they all develop within a host context that constrains their natural history. Since it occurs across the diversity of organisms, one can conjecture that there is order in the cancer multiverse. Is there a way to capture the broad range of tumor types within a space of the possible? Here we define the oncospace, a coordinate system that integrates the ecological, evolutionary and developmental components of cancer complexity. The spatial position of a tumor results from its departure from the healthy tissue along these three axes, and progression trajectories inform about the components driving malignancy across cancer subtypes. We postulate that the oncospace topology encodes new information regarding tumorigenic pathways, subtype prognosis, and therapeutic opportunities: treatment design could benefit from considering how to nudge tumors toward empty evolutionary dead ends in the oncospace.application/pdfeng© 2023 The Authors. BioEssays published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200215Cancer morphospaceDevelopmental abnormalitiesGenome instabilityMicroenvironmental complexityinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess