Your body accumulates trillions of mutations each day, yet we don’t all have cancer.
Why you should care about cancer, how it develops, and potential cures.
Recently, my little cousin had a brain tumor removed. I kept asking why it developed. She wasn’t one to smoke a pack of cigarettes per day or weigh 500 kilograms (after all, she is 4). The answer was it was just pure dumb luck.
Most of the time, cancer isn’t caused by environmental factors but rather by the most intrinsic process of all life.
The Culprit — Cellular Division
Cancer is caused by mutations in a cell’s DNA during cellular division that cause it to grow uncontrollably and spread to other areas of the body.
Cellular division happens all the time — each day, nearly two trillion cells divide. Fun fact, 80% of what you think is dust is actually dead human skin cells 😀!
Mutations during cellular division are also common with our bodies racking up trillions of mutations each day. So how are we not all crawling with tumors? That’s thanks to our immune system 🥰
The immune system fights back — and falls short.
The immune system finds and disrupts most cancer cells through:
- Cytokines: naturally occurring proteins that signal immune cells to destroy abnormal cells.
- Tumour Antigens: abnormal proteins from the immune system that marks cancer as non-self.
The select few that are able to evade the immune system are a pain in the neck (literally and figuratively).
Cancer Cells
- They grow uncontrollably, invading nearby tissue and spreading to other areas of the body (known as metastasis).
- They ignore signals that tell it to stop dividing or perform apoptosis (programmed cell death). When normal cells are crowded by nearby cells, they will stop dividing. This causes a loss of contact inhibition, a mechanism that maintains tissue balance and results in cells piling on each other in lumpy layers.
- They accumulate multiple changes in their chromosomes. In order for a cell to become cancerous, it usually goes through 6 mutations.
🤯 Cool fact: Some cancer cells even convince immune cells to protect the tumor instead of attacking it.
👝 Smuggling across the border — Gene Mutations
The mutations found in cancer cells are like any successful smuggling tag-team (at least from what I know, ie cop shows.)
- Procto-Oncogenes (The Fugitive) Oncogenes are normally involved in cell growth and division but when altered become Procto-Oncogenes which are more active than normal.
- Tumour Suppressor Genes (Corrupt Border Control) These genes are supposed to play cop. They slow down cell division if needed, repair DNA mistakes, or tell cells when to die. However, when they malfunction they allow abnormal cells with Procto-Oncogenes to survive.
🕵️ Stealth Mode — How Cancer Cells Escape the Immune System?
1. Replicative Immortality
Normal cells are limited by the length of their telomeres. They are like the caps on shoelaces that wither with each replication and once they are gone, the cell is no longer able to replicate.
Cancer cells express an enzyme called telomerase which is able to reverse the wearing down of the telomerase, thus allowing cancer cells to duplicate way more.
2. The Warburg Effect.
Cancer Cells switch to a less efficient way of metabolism called fermentation which increases cell growth and division. Fermentation does not require oxygen and can be identified by increased glucose uptake and in the production of lactate, even when oxygen is available.
3. Growth Factor Pathways stuck on ON
They make their own growth factor pathways which are stuck in the ON position or even trick nearby cells into producing growth factors for them.
4. Metastasis
Unlike regular cells, cancer cells are able to cut free from the molecules on the surface of cells that keep them in place. This is what causes cancer to spread from the neck to the lungs to a point unfixable by surgery.
Above that, some of these metastasizing cells known as Dormant Cells basically play dead. They stop duplicating until they do.. and wreak havoc.
Dormant cells are the main cause of cancer relapses, in fact, scientists found some patients receiving organs from a donor who “recovered” from cancer, later developed cancer due to dormant cells in the organ.
5. Angiogenesis
Cancer cells trick the body to produce new blood vessels to connect to the tumor and support it with nutrients and oxygen.
💡 On the positive side, cancer relies on each of these mechanisms thus disrupting one of them can be enough to stop cancer. Scientists have been working on preventing blood vessels from growing towards tumors (angiogenesis). Learn more.
💡Solutions
As you can see, cancer is a beast. It is the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020 which means 2 out of 5 of you reading this right now will get cancer.. but hopefully, by then a cure is available.
Here are 3 promising leads (yes, the detective analogy is still running):
Checkpoint Inhibitors
Checkpoint inhibitors are immunotherapy drugs that block checkpoint proteins from binding with partner proteins. This essentially allows the immune system’s very own, T- Cells to attack cancer cells.
CAR-T Immunotherapy
Scientists try to remove immune cells and replace them with engineered immune cells that can better attack cancer cells.
Oligonucleotide therapeutics
Oligonucleotides are short DNA or RNA molecules that can insert themselves between the double helixes of the mutated DNA, essentially jamming it,
I aspire to work in the space and one day help find a cure for cancer! If you are able to, I encourage you to donate money to cancer research, an investment for the future of yours and your loved ones. If you currently work in cancer research, I would love to talk to you! Please reach out at teerkabaskaran@gmail.com.
