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Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 20, 2015 at 9:06am

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Errant gene turns cells into mobile cancer factories

A single stem cell has the potential to generate an animal made of millions of different types of cells. Some cancers contain stem-like but abnormal cells that can act like mini factories to rapidly churn out not only more copies of themselves, but also variants that are able to better survive in the challenging and changing environments to which cancers are exposed. Worse still, these stem cell-like cancers can spread to other tissues in the body, causing metastasis.

Researchers at the Salk Institute demonstrated how a single master gene, called Sox10, controls if–and to what extent–cells turn into these potentially dangerous factories. This new understanding of Sox10 could help point the way to more efficient therapies for drug-resistant cancers.

“One of the problems with a cancer mass is that it isn’t uniform. You might think of it like the microclimates leading from the Salk Institute down to the beach: some areas have rain and lots of plants while others get sun and look like a desert. Just like plants adapting to different environments, the cancer cells do the same, making some sensitive and other resistant to treatments. We have to be able to confront this tumor heterogeneity to fight cancers more effectively,” says Geoffrey Wahl, professor of Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and senior author of the work, published September 10, 2015 in Cell Reports. “We’ve found that Sox10 is one type of master regulator able to unlock the cell fate door to enable cells to adopt different identities to adapt to different tumor microenvironments.”

For example, this stem cell-like ability is present in an aggressive form of the disease known as triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). TNBC lacks three of the most common targets for breast cancer therapy and makes up about 20 percent of breast cancers in the United States; it also has overactive levels of Sox10. Other labs have shown that high levels of Sox10 are also present in melanoma, another highly metastatic disease.

In the new work, the team looked for genes that were present at high levels in both normal mammary stem cells and breast cancer tissue. One gene that stood out was Sox10, which is part of a group of genes known to control how cells differentiate into mature tissues. Christopher Dravis, the lead author of the study, found that specialized mammary cells with the greatest ability to create different cell types, known as plasticity, had higher levels of Sox10 expression. If the team removed Sox10 from the cells, the cells lost that ability.

Aside from determining how powerful a factory these cells became, high levels of the Sox10’s protein in the right conditions caused a totally unexpected property to arise: the cells became mobile and invaded surrounding areas.

“We have functional evidence linking Sox10 to all of the most dangerous aspects of tumor progression–growth potential, plasticity and spreading, which indicates that Sox10 may be driving these same deadly functions in breast cancers,” says Dravis.

The group plans to test whether eliminating the function of Sox10 could be a way to fight the disease and block metastasis. “Our hope is that continued study of this critical gene will identify other signaling pathways we can inhibit to block the breadth of functions induced by Sox10 that appear to favor tumor progression,” says Dravis.

Another potential application, adds Wahl, is that Sox10 could act as a light bulb to help researchers see the cells that are beginning to move, acting as a faster test for metastatic breast cancer.

“This type of curiosity-driven science aims to understand the basic principles of how an organism is formed and then apply those findings to a very important disease,” says Wahl, who holds Salk’s Daniel and Martina Lewis Chair. “We hope everyday we can bring this work out of the lab to the clinic because it is the patient who we feel ultimately responsible to.”
http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247%2815%2900925-0

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Rare reasons why  people get cancer: 

1. In England, they used to send small children up chimneys to clean them. These kids would be covered head to toe in soot and the British have a reputation for bathing once in 6 months or so. This resulted in these kids getting cancer on the scrotum.
2. In Kashmir, it gets very cold in the winter. People would put some coal in a clay container (a kangri) and hug the kangri to keep warm. This led to cancers on the abdomen due to irritation of the skin by the hot kangri.

3. In some places there is a tradition of reverse smoking, that is keeping the lighted end of cigarette in mouth.

   This has led to cancer of upper surface of the mouth(hard palate).

   eg, in South India(Srikakulam district is one such place).

4. Teeth irritating (for several years) sides of cheeks could cause cancer.

Some more reasons: 

Some of the factors that may induce cancers of different tissues are:

1. Mutagens/Carcinogens such as hazardous chemicals, tobbaco (90% lung cancer cases).
2. Environmental Factors such as prolonged UV exposure.
3. Alcohol use.
4. Obesity.
5. Dietary factors, including insufficient fruit and vegetable intake.
6. Genetic factors
7. Bacteria (Helicobactor Pylori) and Viruses [hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV) and some types of human papilloma virus (HPV)].
8. Harmonal changes
9. Immune system dysfunction.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 18, 2016 at 6:09am

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 24, 2020 at 9:22am

Q: To all the people who say science is everything and even above god, why can't science explain the occurrence of cancer? Science itself says that 70% cancers are merely due to bad luck.

Krishna: It has become a fashion now to criticise science for all the problems in the world. This is like a bad worker blaming his tools to cover his inefficiency.

And blurt out to show your lack of knowledge.

Cancers are a group of diseases in which abnormal cells uncontrollably develop and spread in the body. Science has a clear answer on this disease.

Human cells grow and divide to form new cells as the body needs them. When cells grow old or become damaged, they die, and new cells take their place.

When cancer develops, however, this orderly process breaks down. As cells become more and more abnormal, old or damaged cells survive when they should die, and new cells form when they are not needed. These extra cells can divide without stopping and may form growths called tumours.

Cancer is a disease of our genes – the bits of DNA code that hold the instructions for all of the microscopic machinery inside our cells. Over time, mistakes accumulate in this code. The longer we live, the more time we have for errors to build up. And so, as time passes, our risk of developing cancer goes up, as we accumulate more of these faults in our genes. Genetic changes like mutations occur more frequently too in genes when people get older and some of them can cause malignancy in cells.

Other reasons:

Diet and food quality people choose, more smoking and using pollution-causing products are reasons good enough to cause concerns. Obesity: we now have more obese population than earlier times which raises the risk of developing a number of cancers. More virulent microbial strains like HPV, or human papillomavirus that cause cancer. Indiscriminate use of carcinogenic chemicals and products in our daily lives. Exposure to carcinogens has been scientifically demonstrated to cause cancer .

Answer to the question 'why' on big "C"

Do you still say science doesn’t know what cancer is?

When the studies are going on in a complex subject like science, you can’t lose your patience and blurt out like this. Science takes a long, long time to establish facts and the process can’t be rushed through as easily as you can scream at it like this.

If somebody says ‘cancer happens because of bad luck’, it is this person’s inability to comprehend science behind it properly and bringing beliefs into the realm of science. Several scientists countered it.

It is mostly media misinterpreting the results.

All of these deceptive headlines arose from a widely misinterpreted study that looked at the role of random chance in initiating cancers. That paper was itself criticized for a slew of methodological flaws, and spawned more than a hundred rebuttals. ( well several, I don’t want to put a number to it).

No, We Can’t Say Whether Cancer Is Mostly Bad Luck

Bad luck, bad journalism and cancer rates | @BobOHara @GrrlScientist

Substantial contribution of extrinsic risk factors to cancer develo...

Why most cancer isn't due to 'bad luck'

Is cancer due mostly to “bad luck”?

This lopsided paper triggered a hailstorm of criticism. Some scientists chastised the methods. They called it bad luck because they thought they ‘re unavoidable which is complete nonsense because some are avoidable.

Is cancer just a question of ‘bad luck’?

And you conveniently ignore the hundreds of rebuttals but ‘remember’ just one bad paper to support your view! That shows a total bias.

It is not science that says cancer is due to bad luck. It is a bad paper and a bad interpretation that came to this conclusion.

Now stop criticising science and start finding enlightening knowledge to control this anger or emotions.