Question about Cancer

[Mattze]

Hello everyone,

 

So, there are two different theories (Somatic Mutation Theory and Tissue Organization Field Theory) that supports the explanation of cancer. I would like to find out how these theories relate to each hallmark of cancer (mainly sustained chronic proliferation, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, enabling replicative immortality, activating invasion and metastasis, inducing angiogenesis, avoiding immune destructions, deregulating cellular energetics).

 

For example, would evading growth suppressors be supported by SMT or TOFT? On one hand, there could be mutations which results in the change of expression of tumour suppressors which causes the cancer (supporting SMT), on the other hand, it could have been the result of loss of cell-cell contact inhibition, resulting in the proliferation and formation of the tumour.

 

Is it possible for one hallmark to support both theories, or am I not understanding the two theories correctly.

 

Please help!

[CharonY]

This is a very good question. Broadly speaking, both theoretical frameworks are more suited to explain the origins of a given event, i.e. whether there is a founder cell that it can be attributed to or whether are tissue level interactions or disruptions that initiate the proliferation process. However, they are not necessarily good for categorization of specific events as they are not precisely opposite to each other. Your example is actually a pretty good case which could be broadly categorized to TOFT as the reaction to growth factors is on the tissue level, whereas the proximate cause could have been a mutation. The fact is, TOFT does not make any assumptions about how tissue-level disruptions arise.

 

As both theories are more conceptional rather than mechanism-driven I see them more as complimentary explanatory models that can be used to frame a given set of events. Depending on the type of study you describe (e.g. tracing individual cells vs looking at larger interactions) either one or the other may be more applicable. At this point, it is more a matter of perspective rather than a precise categorization (which nature cares little about, anyway).

Edited April 19, 2017 by CharonY