Defining Resistance and Tolerance to Cancer

There are two ways to maintain fitness in the face of infection: resistance is a host's ability to reduce microbe load and disease tolerance is the ability of the host to endure the negative health effects of infection. Resistance and disease tolerance should be applicable to any insult to the host and have been explored in depth with regards to infection but have not been examined in the context of cancer. Here, we establish a framework for measuring and separating resistance and disease tolerance to cancer in Drosophila melanogaster. We plot a disease tolerance curve to cancer in wild-type flies and then compare this to natural variants, identifying a line with reduced cancer resistance. Quantitation of these two traits opens an additional dimension for analysis of cancer biology.