Hallmarks of cancer: of all cancer cells, all the time?

In two landmark articles, Hanahan and Weinberg synthesized into one conceptual framework ‘the hallmarks of cancer’, a massive amount of information describing the characteristics of a cancer cell. Although this is neither the intention nor the belief of the authors, hallmarks are often interpreted a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Trends in molecular medicine 2012-09, Vol.18 (9), p.509-515
Main Authors: Floor, Sébastien L, Dumont, Jacques E, Maenhaut, Carine, Raspe, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cell Transformation, Neoplastic
cells and of time
dynamic heterogeneity of cancer tissue
hallmarks
Humans
Neoplasms - etiology
Neoplasms - genetics
Neoplasms - pathology
Neovascularization, Pathologic
oncogenic events
Pathology
Phenotype
Signal Transduction
signaling
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Summary:In two landmark articles, Hanahan and Weinberg synthesized into one conceptual framework ‘the hallmarks of cancer’, a massive amount of information describing the characteristics of a cancer cell. Although this is neither the intention nor the belief of the authors, hallmarks are often interpreted as applying to a canonic cancer cell, or equally to all cells within a cancer. In this article, we clarify the separate concepts of causes, oncogenic events, signal transduction programs, and hallmarks to show that there is no unimodal relation between these concepts but a complex network of interrelations that vary in different cells, between cells, and at different times in any given cell. We consider cancer as an evolving, dynamic, and heterogeneous system, explaining, at least in part, the difficulty of treating cancer and supporting the use of simultaneous, multitarget therapies.
ISSN:1471-4914
1471-499X
DOI:10.1016/j.molmed.2012.06.005