Cancer biology. We know a lot, we don’t know quite a bit …
Posted by rbrands on March 22, 2010
As we look at natural history in 513, it’s a good idea to remember that being a physician scientist involves having an open mind. We all have in our memories the standard picture of the rise and progression of cancer. One bad cells leads to two, then four etc. In pictures, a little ball of cells becomes a bigger and bigger ball. The message is that bigness is badness, and getting rid of the bigness is in some sense actually attacking the roots of cancer.
Pictures are not reality. This picture might reflect the underlying biological reality. But it might not. The facts we know are reality, and more than one picture might be compatible with the underlying facts. Take a look at this article in Science, which talks about circulating tumor cells and what they might mean. This ties in with an idea in cancer science that the important cells in cancer might actually be a small (actually tiny) subset of the tumor which are cancer stem cells.
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