Understanding How Cancer Arises and Spreads:

The normal human body possesses some 30 trillion cells, which live in harmony with one another, helping them form, grow, proliferate and then die. Each cell has a fixed life span. Their life is strictly regulated. Each cell maintains a size and architecture appropriate to the body needs. Cancer cells violate this scheme.

They have two properties that are different from those of normal cells – (1) They ignore the normal control signals, they become ‘deaf’ to the control instructions. (2) They can migrate from the site where they began, invading nearby healthy tissues, to far off sites of the body, thus enabling far faster proliferation.

It all starts from a common ancestral cell, that somehow develops an ability for an appropriate reproduction. Two gene classes play a major role in this – the ‘Proto-oncogenes’, which encourage growth – enlargement and division of cells – and Tumour Suppressor Genes’ that inhibit growth. Both are important in the development and growth of a human body.

Both can cause cancer – the former by becoming overactive and the latter when it is suppressed. A variety of genes have been discovered that aid the growth and proliferation of malignant tumours.

Invasion and Metastasis are the lethal processes that enable cancer to spread rapidly in a body. First a cancer cell or cells detach from the primary site and breach the basement membrane that separates them from the other tissues or layers. They then travel through the blood stream and lodge themselves on a new cell membrane. They adhere to the epithelial cell or a capillary and can create a secondary tumour. There are certain specific tissues, which are vulnerable for such invasion, having an ‘area code’ for cancer cells to seek, so to say. Knowledge of these ‘addresses’ would eventually lead to solutions against metastasis.

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