Andrea Sottoriva

Andrea Sottoriva proposed the Big Bang model of tumor evolution demonstrating that many tumors grow as a single clonal expansion with neutral evolutionary dynamics rather than through sequential selective sweeps, fundamentally challenging the prevailing stepwise model of cancer progression. His research has shown that much of intratumor heterogeneity can be explained by neutral drift rather than Darwinian selection, with important implications for interpreting clonal dynamics and predicting treatment response. His mathematical modeling approaches have provided quantitative frameworks for distinguishing selection from drift in tumor evolution.