Are all the different cancers really that different or is it all just cancer and we just specify where it formed?
In: Biology
Different. At uni they threw us the estimate that cancer is really over 200 different diseases. Its a big part of why it’s so hard to cure or more specifically why curing all of them is difficult.
There are 6-10 basic conditions that need to be met to get a metastatic cancer. But any pathway of mutations that achieve this is fair game. Add on top of that the difference in individuals genetics, different tissues of origin and you start to see how they could be so different.
There are similarities though. The gene p53 is known as the guardian of the genome because in almost every cancer it’s functioning is perturbed in some manner, whether directly or indirectly.
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