Are all the different cancers really that different or is it all just cancer and we just specify where it formed?
In: Biology
So there are two basic types of cellular pathways that affect cancerous cells. You can basically lump these into pro-cancerous and anti-cancerous.
The “pro-cancerous” pathways aren’t actually promoting cancer in the body, but they are systems when they function incorrectly cause cancerous conditions to occur. As an example, there is a chemical pathway that tells cells that they need to reproduce and make more cells. This pathway can go haywire and always be triggered and the cell will reproduce at a much higher rate than usual.
Then we have anti-cancerous pathways. These are pathways that are supposed to stop cancerous conditions from happening. My favorite one of these is basically a suicide pathway. If your cell determines that something is wrong with it’s function it is programmed to basically explode (lyse) and kill itself. If fact it’s estimated that many people get “cancer” multiple times in their life, but the your cells identify and suicides before it is able to become full fledged cancer and damage the body. Another one is called contact inhibition. Basically of a cell is pressed up against something it knows not to keep making more because it won’t fit, but in cells with this function impaired there is no check on it’s normal growth cycle and can promote cancer.
For cancer to occur it’s estimated that you need between 4-8 of these genetic pathways to become mutated and both types. My info is a bit old but as of a few years ago they have identified around 15 pro-cancerous genetic pathways and 11 anti-cancerous pathways. If you think about it a cancer can be any permutation of those mutations so a cancer in the same tissue between two different people can be completely different and that just going by what we understand now, without full and complete understanding of cellular mechanics.
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