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“So it’s important to understand that a cancer cell is not a cell or something that got introduced to, to your body. It’s not like a foreign object. A cancer cell is actually a regular cell of yours that ended up undergoing a couple of mutations or qualities that now has made it gone rogue. So all of our normal cells from the day we’re born, basically have “”on”” switches. And when you flip the switch on that means go ahead and replicate. They also have signals that say blow up, or there’s an error here and stop growing and stop replicating. You have a, basically a mess up in your blueprint and we want the cell to be gone. And your immune system is constantly keeping it in check to when they do see a cell that looks less than normal or some quality about it, that’s bad, it’ll actually attack it.
And kind of, you know, wipe out that colony of potentially a badly mutated cell or, or colony of cells that could become cancerous. So what happens is each time you replicate your, your normal cells, you start getting little mutations and things in the blueprint that kind of go undetected, not enough to mess the cell up, but they just are errors. And what happens over your lifetime is the more times you replicate, you get more of these errors that get undetected, which is why cancer is generally something diagnosis of age, right? The older you get, the more common cancers are. And that’s why, it’s because you replicating and getting these errors. That switch, for example, that says to stay on, it gets fixed in an on spot, and it doesn’t know how to be down-regulated or stopped. And that’s when you start seeing this like much faster growth on what was a regular cell, that’s now unregulated, or some of these stops, these blow up buttons that say there’s some mutations and I can see it.
And I need to undergo an explosion, TP 53, for example, they get knocked out or they stop working. So now you have a colony of cells that are not listening in the way they supposed to. And that’s what cancer is. And you can imagine that if they have a lot of the qualities and properties of your regular cells, it makes it pretty difficult to treat. How do you treat something that more or less is your regular cell with just a couple of these switches and stuff that are off or on? These switches are called proto-oncogenes. And that’s just a fancy term to mean there’s something that needs to happen. You need to switch for your regular cells, but if you have a mutation in it, like, say for KRAS, that’s what all of a sudden it becomes an oncogene. Now, it is the driver that’s making this regular cell unregulated and a cancer cell.”
