Cell Division Within Cancer Cells

...

of cancer, only a few of them occur more frequently than the rest. More than 500,000 Americans die from cancer every year because the cancer can affect ten different body sites. The four most common cancers, which account for more than half of all cases of cancer, are those of the lung, breast, prostate, and colon. The deadliest by far is lung cancer, which is responsible for almost 30% of all deaths caused by cancer.

One of the core features of cancer is the tumors ability to clone, which is the development of the tumor from single cells that begin to multiply abnormally. Tumor tissues generally only express one allele of a heterozygous X chromosome gene. However, the cloned origin of the tumor does not mean that the original progenitor cell has already acquired all of the characteristics of a cancer cell, it just means that the characteristics may take more time to appear. The development of cancer is a multistep process in which cells slowly become malignant through a continual series of alterations. One initiation of the multistep development of cancer is that most cancers develop later on in your life. The inhabitance of colon cancer, for example, multiplies more than ten times between the ages of 30 and 50, and multiplies another ten times between the ages of 50 and 70. This dramatic increase of possibly having cancer with age suggests that most cancers may develop as a consequence of multiple abnormalities, which will accumulate over the period of many years.

The development of cancer is viewed as a multistep process involving mutation for cells with progressively increasing capacity for proliferation, survival, invasion, and metastasis. The first step in the process, the initiation if the tumor, is thought to be the result of a genetic mishap leading to abnormal multiplication of a single cell. Cell proliferation then leads to the outgrowth of a population of clonally derived tumor cells. Tumor progression continues as more mutations occur within the cells of the tumor population.

The uncontrolled growth of cancer cells is a result from the accumulated abnormalities that affecting many of the cell regulatory mechanisms. This relationship is reflected in several aspects of the cell behavior that is distinguished in cancer cells from normal cells. Cancer cells typically tend to display abnormalities in the mechanisms that regulate normal cell proliferation, differentiation, and survival. Altogether, these characteristic properties of cancer cells provide a description of their malignancies. Normal cells proliferate until they reach a certain cell density, while cancer cells multiply without checking the cells density. This is what ultimately makes cancer cells so malicious.

...