Symptoms And Treatment Of Cancer - 1303 Words

Introduction Cancer, also known as malignant neoplasm, the hallmark characteristic involves uncontrolled proliferation of cells. Under normal conditions cell grow, divide and die, but in cancer cells the defect takes place at the gene level leading to the formation of an abnormal DNA. As genes are the basic control machines of the cell, alteration of any kind may bring devastating consequences, or malignancy. Moreover, in normal cells damage of any kind is taken care by the repair system but in cancer cells, the repair function is altered, hence damaged DNA is not repaired, occurs, cells divide continuously without displaying senescence, generating a series of abnormal cells (Alberts, 2007). (Normal cell†¦show more content†¦Cancer Proliferation Cancer is initiated in the cell, the basic unit of any living entity. Under normal conditions the cell follow the regular cell cycle but any chemical, physical or biological agent may trigger the conversion of proto-oncogene to oncog ene, the active form of cancer causing gene which is responsible for the altered metabolism of the cell. The genetic basis of cancer has been revealed through numerous animal models. The human Genome Project aids in improving preclusion, analysis and management of cancer with better efficacy (Luo, 2008). Luo et al (2008) have identified essential genes in 12 cancer cell lines, they were exploited to find the presumed and established oncogenes such as KRAS, EGFR, MYC, MYB, BCR-ABL, CDK4 and CRKL that are vital for cancer cell proliferation and are found to be altered in the human cancers. Their findings postulate that tumoricidal agents trigger the expression of four genes PTPN1, NF1, SMARCB1, and SMARCE1. Moreover, five regulators are also activated in response to FAS activation, FAS, FADD, CASP8, ARID1A and CBX1. The information is beneficial for pursuing future cancer studies as well as for therapeutics. A comparative study between normal stem cells and cancer stem cells states that signal transduction namely Bmi1 and Wnt are shared by the normal as well as cancer stem cells for cellular proliferation. Perception and thorough understanding for cancer stem cells will certainly aid in recognition of the drug