This is a guest
post by David Reis. If you're interested in submitting
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me.
What
is cancer? How does it develop and what treatments will
the future offer?
First it’s important to note that
cancer is made out of cells from your own body that have, so to speak,
decided
to revolt and do their own thing. Our body naturally needs to replace
itself as you wear out, and some tissues are constantly growing. On a
daily basis, we make hundreds of billions of new blood cells for
instance.
Problems arise when the body loses
its natural balance. A breast cell, say, that only is supposed to
divide
10 times undergoes a mutation that removes some of the checkpoints.
But that alone isn’t usually enough. For cancer to develop, typically
several things have to go wrong. So the breast cell loses the
restriction that prevents it from dividing more than 10 times – and
loses the
system that tells it to commit suicide (or apoptosis) if it grows too
much.
The result could be a tumor.
Still, not all cancers lead to
disease. The breast cell can grow a little bit then stop. Or it can
start growing abnormally but trigger the body’s immune response which
either
wipes it out or stops it from growing further.
