Are all the different cancers really that different or is it all just cancer and we just specify where it formed?
In: Biology
This is an excellent question! First let’s appreciate that there are about 37 trillion cells in a human body. That’s a huge number of very diverse cells that all have the same single ancestor, the fertilized egg cell. How can all of these cells have the same ancestor and yet all perform different functions? Nearly every cell in the body has the same DNA (notable exceptions for unique mutations that can arise in specific cells due to damage or mistakes, these cells can become cancerous). However, DNA is like a detailed and complete instruction manual for all cells, but each cell only needs access to a few chapters or even pages at a time: the chapters relevant to their specific environment and what their specific function is. Because every cell has a unique life history, the exact order of environments and stimuli during that cell’s life, they each behave slightly differently. So not only is every cancer different, every cell is different! This means that the same cancer can behave differently patient to patient, or within a patient in different locations, or within a patient over time. Notable differences in behavior are also present within populations of cancer cells in a patient.
These differences cause cells within the cancerous population to all react differently to a treatment and this variability can enhance the population’s ability to survive/replicate.
Different types of cancers can arise from many different sources (rare mutations due to environment, genetic defects inherited from the parents that are ubiquitous, etc.). The cause of the cancer can dramatically influence its behavior and there are often random affects that effect many parts of the cells at once. Unique combinations of mutations, the particular life history of the affected cells, their environment, the unique DNA sequence of the human, the humans life history, and many other factors can all dramatically affect the cancer’s behavior (though it is difficult to quantify just how much each factor can influence). Therefore, the huge number of possibilities nearly guarantees that every cancer and every cancer cell is unique, and their differences can be significant enough to influence patient outcomes.
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