Introduction Adult tissues contain a multitude of cell types that are spatially and functionally coordinated to regulate normal tissue homeostasis. When a tissue becomes injured, for example, from a skin wound, there is a surge of infiltrating cell types and…
In the written history of medicine, neoplasms have been diagnosed for nearly 4000 years. Almost from the beginning, medical practitioners recognized that the most life-threatening attribute of neoplastic cells is the ability to disseminate and colonize distant tissues. When tumors…
Solid tumors require a vascular system to grow beyond about 2 mm in diameter, a size at which diffusion of oxygen and nutrients is limiting. The establishment of a tumor vasculature through the process of angiogenesis overcomes these limitations, while…
Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Ms. Negest Williams for unparalleled administrative support. The discovery in the 1970s of proto-oncogenes, genes that become oncogenic (“cancer causing”) either through genetic modifications or increased expression, and tumor suppressor genes, those that if…
The term senescence was coined more than 50 years ago to describe the loss of replicative capacity of normal human diploid cells in culture. At that time, senescence was proposed to generally reflect the process of cellular aging. Early studies…
In the simple arithmetic of life, a tissue grows if cells divide more frequently than they die, whereas one in which cell death is more frequent than cell division shrinks. This arithmetic, trivial as it seems, is at the heart…
Why Is Metabolism Important to an Understanding of Cancer? At its heart, cancer is a disease of abnormal proliferation. Proliferation represents a distinct metabolic challenge: cells must replicate all of their proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids to generate a daughter…
What Is Cell Growth? Cell growth is the process by which cells accumulate mass and increase in physical size. On average, dividing animal cells are approximately 10 to 20 μm in diameter. Terminally differentiated cells have a wide range of…
Basic Principles of Cell Cycle Progression The essential function of cell cycle control is the regulated duplication of the cells’ genetic blueprint and the division of this genetic material such that one copy is provided to each daughter cell following…
∗ Disclaimer: Max S. Wicha has financial holdings and is a scientific adviser for OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, is a scientific adviser for Veristem, and has research support from Dompe. Accumulating evidence suggests that most if not all tumors are maintained by…