CELL DIVISION: WHERE DOES CANCER START?

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy 

11/03/2013

BIOLOGY

CELL DIVISION: WHERE DOES CANCER START?

Like so many of the beautiful things in our universe, cells have a life cycle.

Their existence begins with a new beginning, they grow into maturity and then they fade away and die.

Life Cycle of a Star

In humans, some cells continue to grow and divide for the rest of your life (skin cells), while others will grow only when they need to from an injury (liver cells), while others never regrow (muscle and nerve cells).

Life Cycle of a Frog

But all follow this cycle of birth, growth and then death.

Life Cycle of a Cell

Except for one type of cell.

This type of cell has a name that we all know and fear.

A name that undoubtedly has touched every human on this planet.

Cancer…

The life cycle of cells is controlled by an extremely complex set of checks and balances that allow the cell to progress to the next stage of its life cycle. These checks and balances also stop the cell from staying in the wrong sequence.

If even one of these balances is wrong then the cell can malfunction.

Never the less, even when this function is broken, the cell usually sends out a distress signal that causes special proteins to immediately cause it to self-destruct before it can cause any damage.

It takes a special type of malfunction that causes the cell to not only get stuck in a particular life cycle, but also for it to not send out the signal for help.

It takes an even more special kind of malfunction for a cell to get stuck in a life cycle where the order of the cell is to reproduce, for all of its offspring to reproduce and this to process to never stop.

And finally, it takes the ultimate kind of malfunction to occur where all of this happens and the cells can spread to anywhere in the body and continue to grow.

This type of cell is called a malignant cancer.

While this horror is truly a scourge on humanity there is, as always, opportunities amongst the disaster.

Even the most prolific of normal cell types can only divide twenty to twenty five times before they themselves die.

Cancer cells never die.

There have been some cancer cells extracted from a woman in the fifties that are still growing in a lab to this day.

It seems that as long as they are supplied with nutrients they will continue to grow forever, they are considered immortal.

If we could harness this amazing longevity power perhaps we could create cells that work normally but never die…

Cancer also provides a glimpse into the workings of cells. How the different parts that make it up work together to create life…

But realistically, there is no silver lining with cancer.

The horrible truth is that we don’t really know enough about how cells work and how the mutations that cause cancer start.

We know risk factors and that’s about it.

Research continues, and in the interim millions will die from this scourge.

The growth towards personalised medicine continues to be a beacon of hope for many. As specially tailored drugs are built for specific personalised cancers, but that story is for another day.