Leading scientists are embarking on a new war against cancer, aimed not necessarily at curing it but at turning it into a condition that people can live with.

The world-renowned Institute of Cancer Research is launching what it calls the first-ever “Darwinian” cancer programme. Just as with antibiotics, they say, cancers can evolve to become resistant to the drugs used to treat them. Cancer cells that are not killed off by chemotherapy or even immunotherapy will eventually mutate and adapt to form new tumours. The cancer returns in metastatic or advanced form, often elsewhere in the body, and is usually fatal.

The ICR wants to refocus its work, aiming not just to kill cancer cells but to destroy their ability to evolve. The aim is to take the lethality out of cancer and turn it into a disease that – if a cure is not possible – will no longer shorten or ruin lives, in the same way that HIV is controlled for millions of people on antiretroviral drugs.

Prof Paul Workman, chief executive of the ICR, said his team was hugely excited. “It’s about tackling the biggest challenge we face in cancer treatment and cancer biology, which is drug resistance,” he said.

Their first drug to slow down or stop the evolution of cancer cells could be available in 10 years, they say. It will target a molecule called APOBEC, which is crucial to the workings of the immune system, but is also hijacked in over half of cancer types to speed up evolution of drug resistance.

The drug could be given alongside other cancer-killing drugs. “We believe this will be the first treatment in the world that, rather than dealing with the consequences of cancer’s evolution and resistance, aims to directly confront the disease’s ability to adapt and evolve in the first place,” said the ICR’s Dr Olivia Rossanese.

Dr Rossanese will be head of biology at the new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, next to the Royal Marsden hospital in Sutton, Surrey, which the ICR is building to advance this work programme. It will house scientists from many disciplines, from AI and advanced maths to the biological sciences.

Workman said they need £15m more to complete the centre, in addition to the £75m the ICR has already invested. He hopes for philanthropic donations. If they get the money, he said, “we can bring together under one roof experts in cancer therapeutics alongside others studying evolution in animals, cells and individual patients, to create a new generation of cancer treatments.”

The researchers are already working on a number of projects. Dr Andrea Sottoriva, who will be deputy director of cancer evolution at the new centre, said they were exploring “the idea of using combinations of existing drugs together or in sequence to do what we call evolutionary herding”. They want, he said, “to play evolution in our favour and push cancers towards an evolutionary dead end.” Using AI, they could work out how to drive development of the cancer cells towards forms that are more susceptible to drugs.

Workman said tackling cancer evolution was a fundamentally new approach. “What we’re really looking at here is a culture change – among cancer researchers and clinicians, and also among patients,” he said. “We will always strive to cure cancer, but in advanced disease where that may not be possible an evolutionary approach opens up the prospect of long-term control with a good quality of life.

“We would like to take some of the fear away from advanced cancer, and hope patients will benefit from new approaches that may not always give them the ‘all clear’, but could keep cancer at bay for many years.”