Cancer: a complex collection of different diseases

All cancers are caused by normal cell growth gone awry

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the US and a diagnosis we all hope to never receive. What many people don’t realize is that cancer is not a single disease, but rather hundreds of different illnesses that result from abnormal cellular processes such as uncontrolled cell growth and division.

All new cells come from preexisting cells through a cell division process called mitosis. During this process, a cell must pass several 'checkpoints', mechanisms controlled by hundreds of genes, to ensure that it will divide properly. During normal cell division, if a cell fails to pass the several checkpoints, a self-destruction pathway will be implemented to ensure errors that may have occurred don’t get passed to daughter cells.

When these checkpoint genes are mutated, errors that occur during division may be overlooked, and faulty cells may continue to grow and divide into tumors, instead of self-destructing. Cancerous cells typically have mutations in these checkpoint genes allowing them to ignore the normal cell growth & death processes. They continue to divide even if defective, mutate further away from normal & multiply faster.

Remember: mutations occur due to random error, but mutations that enable a cell to ‘ignore’ these regulatory checkpoints may persist.

Not all gene mutations will lead to the formation of malignant tumors (cancer), but an estimated 400+ genes are associated with cancer development, particularly if mutations occur in these types of genes: