4 ms·

Cancer is not one disease. It's one symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes.

by api 12y ago

possibilistic 12y ago
This is something so few people understand. And even if they did, they would still have to appreciate the thermodynamics and the non-linearity of the systems involved. Medicine typically only knocks on the door with extracellular signaling. The cell remains a black box. Even if it weren't, with cancer we'd have to select certain cell populations based on internal cues that may never be exposed. Then there's the structure and pharmacology problems--there's a lot of chemistry and calculus along the path from drug introduction.
danieltillett 12y ago
Cancer is certainly not one disease, but it in not the symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes - it the consequence of the failure of one regulatory system, the system that controls cell division. The complication comes about since there are multiple pathways involved in this one system.
- possibilistic 12y ago
  Name the final edge in the transduction graph of a proliferation, apoptosis, or cell cycle regulation pathway. I suppose you can do this for a cell in a terminally differentiated state of your choosing. (But as you know, pre-cancerous cells are typically in fuzzy states that break our tidy little metabolic models.)
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    Cell division is by nature binary. Of course the process of division is probabilistic so that a regulated cell is unlikely to divide unless the conditions in the niche are favourable, while a unregulated cell is much more likely to divide even when division is not favourable.
    - possibilistic 12y ago
      You didn't directly answer my question, but now I'm just going to be pedantic :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding Even with normal binary fission, there is never an equal distribution of products between cells. Metabolite concentration, organelle distribution, etc. will vary. (If you think about it, it's kind of an interesting period of rough perturbation made to an extremely high-order dynamical system.) At a kind of base level, though, the genome itself regularly experiences abnormal partitioning that leads to certain interesting states. It's not strictly binary... But back to the previous topic. Epithelia and endothelia are regularly dividing cell types. (It's interesting that most cancers arise from these lineages, right?) Blood cells are another lineage that undergo pretty frequent proliferation. (On an entirely unrelated note, I can't wait for an HN discussion pertaining to quantum effects on biological systems--it's a topic I really want to learn more about. The absorption spectra discussions in the retinal thread has awoken my curiosity. For instance: though it's kind of a controversial, maybe even a pseudo-scientific topic, the quantum effects on microtubules are fun to think about and are still actively researched.)
frozenport 12y ago
Or an Oncovirus :-)

Cancer is not one disease. It's one symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes.

by api 12y ago

Cancer is not one disease. It's one symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes.

This is something so few people understand. And even if they did, they would still have to appreciate the thermodynamics and the non-linearity of the systems involved. Medicine typically only knocks on the door with extracellular signaling. The cell remains a black box. Even if it weren't, with cancer we'd have to select certain cell populations based on internal cues that may never be exposed. Then there's the structure and pharmacology problems--there's a lot of chemistry and calculus along the path from drug introduction.

danieltillett 12y ago

Cancer is certainly not one disease, but it in not the symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes - it the consequence of the failure of one regulatory system, the system that controls cell division. The complication comes about since there are multiple pathways involved in this one system.

possibilistic 12y ago
Name the final edge in the transduction graph of a proliferation, apoptosis, or cell cycle regulation pathway. I suppose you can do this for a cell in a terminally differentiated state of your choosing. (But as you know, pre-cancerous cells are typically in fuzzy states that break our tidy little metabolic models.)
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Cell division is by nature binary. Of course the process of division is probabilistic so that a regulated cell is unlikely to divide unless the conditions in the niche are favourable, while a unregulated cell is much more likely to divide even when division is not favourable.
  - possibilistic 12y ago
    You didn't directly answer my question, but now I'm just going to be pedantic :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding Even with normal binary fission, there is never an equal distribution of products between cells. Metabolite concentration, organelle distribution, etc. will vary. (If you think about it, it's kind of an interesting period of rough perturbation made to an extremely high-order dynamical system.) At a kind of base level, though, the genome itself regularly experiences abnormal partitioning that leads to certain interesting states. It's not strictly binary... But back to the previous topic. Epithelia and endothelia are regularly dividing cell types. (It's interesting that most cancers arise from these lineages, right?) Blood cells are another lineage that undergo pretty frequent proliferation. (On an entirely unrelated note, I can't wait for an HN discussion pertaining to quantum effects on biological systems--it's a topic I really want to learn more about. The absorption spectra discussions in the retinal thread has awoken my curiosity. For instance: though it's kind of a controversial, maybe even a pseudo-scientific topic, the quantum effects on microtubules are fun to think about and are still actively researched.)

frozenport 12y ago

Or an Oncovirus :-)