What is the most elementary form of life in which cancer occurs? The following are introductory remarks regarding human cancer in a landmark paper from Cell. But cancer also occurs in plants, fish, and amphibians. What is the simplest form of life that manifests malignant degeneration? And please, no lawyer jokes... Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg Cell 2011 "The hallmarks of cancer comprise six biological capabilities acquired during the multistep develop- ment of human tumors. The hallmarks constitute an organizing principle for rationalizing the complexities of neoplastic disease. They include sustaining proliferative signaling, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, enabling replicative immortality, inducing angiogenesis, and acti- vating invasion and metastasis. Underlying these hallmarks are genome instability, which generates the genetic diversity that expedites their acquisition, and inflammation, which fosters multiple hall- mark functions. Conceptual progress in the last decade has added two emerging hallmarks of potential generality to this list—reprogramming of energy metabolism and evading immune destruction. In addition to cancer cells, tumors exhibit another dimension of complexity: they contain a repertoire of recruited, ostensibly normal cells that contribute to the acquisition of hall- mark traits by creating the ‘‘tumor microenvironment.’’ Recognition of the widespread applicability of these concepts will increasingly affect the development of new means to treat human cancer."
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:28:41 +0000
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