Douglas Hanahan, biologist: We don't necessarily need a cure, what we really need is cancer without disease'

"The two met at a conference in Hawaii and agreed on the need to embark on a monumental task: make sense of the overwhelming complexity of the hundreds of illnesses we refer to using a single word. There just seemed to be so much complexity and no clarity, variable responses to therapy and just the deluge of Big Data describing the hallmarks of different tumors,"

"In their first attempt, which has since been updated (most recently in Cell magazine), Hanahan and Weinberg described groups of outlaw cells with no respect for the exquisite rules that preserve harmony among millions of the body's cells, and that evade its security systems meant to maintain order. They found six distinctive hallmarks between these rule-defying cells related to when they divide, when they stop dividing, when they die and how they cooperate with others so that the body continues to function."

"The first of these hallmarks is that, in contrast to normal cells that only divide when the body requests it, carcinogenic cells proliferate whenever they want, and endlessly. The second is that they are able to evade molecular barriers that halt proliferation when there is no longer space to grow or fuel with which to do so. The third is that they resist programmed cellular death that normally forces damaged cells to commit suicide. Their fourth superpower is that they are practically immortal."

A unifying framework reduced the complexity of many distinct malignancies into core biological capabilities that clarify tumor diversity and inconsistent therapy responses. Six distinctive hallmarks characterize cancer cells, describing when they divide, when they stop dividing, when they die, and how they cooperate to sustain the organism. Cancer cells can proliferate autonomously and indefinitely, evade molecular barriers that normally halt growth when space or resources diminish, resist programmed cell death that eliminates damaged cells, and acquire near-immortality by bypassing normal limits on division.

Read at english.elpais.com