As the title says, I want to know how does cancer form and expand on the body and why is it so hard to treat sometimes.
Pd: I’m sorry if I wrote something incorrectly, english is not my first language.
In: Biology
MSc. Biomed here. 🙂 Used to do some cancer research during my internships too.
You already got some explanations here but will toss in my own regardless:
Cancer is a mix of a few things going wrong in the same cell. It’s never one thing, hence why there are pre-cancerous cells and cancer genes that don’t indicate active cancer, but much higher cancer risk (less things need to go wrong next, so cancer is much more likely). Basically these things going wrong are:
* Uncontrolled growth. Usually this is an activating mutation for a signaling pathway in the cell.
* Diminished or blocked self-destruction. Cells that are damaged or irregular will either try to moderate and repair the damage, or if it is too severe, kill themselves to not endanger the body. Cancer cells need this last part to be turned off.
* Diminished or blocked self-regulation. Similar to the above point, cells generally have controls for their pathways. If something is extremely high, there’s usually something slowing it down to keep it in check. These also need to be disrupted, and some are so important/common to stopping uncontrolled growth they are literally known as tumor suppressor genes.
The specifics depend on the cancer, but there’s pretty common trends, and a lot of pathways or specific mutations that are commonly observed among different cancer forms.
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