Words Of Wisdom On Cancer

Remember, this is from a cancer research scientist! 

If it took so many years for a well trained person like her to get an "insight" that cancer is part of a complex system then there is no hope for common folks to understand ever. 

What you eat, where you live, how many chemicals you use in everyday life, outsourcing the food you eat, little choices you make every second - all matters plus zillion other things.The good news is you can control all this while you cannot control your race, your parents and such. 

But yet people prefer to believe "they" have "cure" for cancer, "war" on cancer and other stupid theories. 

I paid in the most painful way with Max's life with the choices I made and the beliefs of other people. 

So next time someone close to you is diagnosed with cancer - don't walk or run for cancer,  don't dwell in support groups to find closure (whatever that means) instead unpack their lifestyle - I mean everything, donate your data and  urge someone close to do so too. 

Let's get to the insights: 

One problem is the high level of variation, or heterogeneity, in tumours: variation between people, between tumours within the same person and even between regions within the same tumour.

By variation, I mean this: if you separated out the cancer cells within a tumour, they would not all be identical. You would find subpopulations of cells with diverse molecular characteristics. Some subpopulations will be larger than others, but this can change in time as the cancer progresses, and as it is challenged by different types of treatments.

This variation is not just the result of differences in the genetics of cells within a tumour. There are also differences in epigenetics (reversible changes to DNA that can impact how the genetic information is read), differences in the environment surrounding the tumour (e.g., oxygen levels, acidity levels), and differences in the interactions between the cancerous cells and other types of cells: cells that provide structure, cells that make up blood vessels, immune cells and even microbes.

Add to that the genetic and environmental differences between people, and differences in the ways cancer developed in each individual.

What you end up with is a highly complex picture in which tumours can exploit a potentially infinite pool of resources in order to continue to grow, spread and evade destruction.

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We can view a tumour as a complex system, in which many components interact with and influence each other, with the purpose of keeping the tumour alive and thriving. Any changes within this system can impact, either positively, or negatively, the tumour’s ability to persist and thrive.

Therapeutic interventions aim to destabilise this complex system, in order to shrink and destroy the tumour. But as we saw earlier, these interventions are relatively homogenous, focusing on a small number of molecular alterations, whereas the tumour can leverage a much more diverse repertoire of changes.