The presence of telomerase which prevents telomere shortening in cancer cells is said to be one of the leading causes of the continuous proliferation (avoiding ageing) of cancer cells. What other causes or factors can be attributed to the cause of cancer cell immortality?
I guess telemere shortening is an hallmark of aging and aging has a positive correlation with cancer. Therefore, telemere shortening is indirectly but positively correlated with cancer.
There are 6 hallmarks of cancer can be they are
(1) Stimulate self growth, (2) They resist inhibitory growth signals (3) Resist apoptosis (4) They have limitless replicative potential) (5) Angiogenesis and neo-angiogenesis) and (6) Invasion or metastasis.
Other not mentioned above hallmarks of cancer are: (7) reprogramming of cellular metabolism (8) remodeling of the tissue microenvironment/the interactions with the tumor stroma, and (9) genetic evolution of cancer cells. In my opinion, all of these nine hallmarks of cancer can contribute to the immortality of cancer cells.
The previous answer are correct, however, keep in mind that as these mechanism that allow cells to keep growing even after several mutations, cancer cells keep accumulating mutations and usually polysomia. Despite cells become ¨immortal¨ they keep changing, and cancer cell lines behavior changes through passages.
@Diego Raffo, in essense, you are implying that cultured cancer cells have the tendency of changing morphological over a long period of time?
Yes indeed, cell lines changes through passages. Cells with 20 passages might not respond equal to a cell with 30 or 40 passages. It is always important to check if there are changes in the response to treatments in different passages and chose a range of passages were you are certain cells will have a similar response. For example, I used 3 different MCF7 breast cancer cell lines that came from different labs, the all were morphologically different (similar, but different) and responded different to treatment as well. Another example, the cell line I used for my phD that was a murine breast cancer cell line at higher passages (35 or higher) it had the MAPK/ERK pathway basally activated while below passage 30 it wasn’t.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Oncology
- Cancer Research
- Cancer Biology
- Cancer Cells