Cancer – Unregulated Cell Growth

Transcript

So you have that kind of pathway on why a normal cell has become a cancer now. It is stuck on on, and it is continuing to replicate. The other pathway you could have is what we talked about with the stop sign and the thing that says, “Hey, it’s time to destroy this cell.” You can incur errors where those stop signs and those things to say, stop growing, it’s time to die, that button doesn’t work. So it’s not necessarily growing faster, but it just doesn’t stop. And then of course you can have a problem with both. Now what’s particularly scary is you could imagine if a cell is unregulated and is growing faster than it’s supposed to, or it’s not stopping, it’s still able to get more mutations, more mechanisms, to be able to even further escape these things that are in place to kill the cell. This is the concept, which we’ll get into, on why eventually, even with targeted therapy or immune therapy or chemotherapy, originally, you can have a great response and you can see a lot of the cancer die and people gain their weight back and they have a good quality of life. But unless you destroy the last cell, which in a stage four or metastatic setting, which we’ll talk about in a different video on the staging, unless you can get every cell out, eventually the ones in the stage four setting get smart enough to get more mechanisms and they can escape the way that you were killing it with therapy, and they can incur another pathway of resistance.