BIOLOGY OF THE CANCER CELL

Our organism is a collection of a big number of cells, each of them an organism in its own being and which lives its own complicated life but is constantly interacting with all the other cells from this collection by adequately responding to signals from them and, in its turn, send signals. Thanks to this complex social behavior of each cell from the millions and trillions of cells helping each other and also that every cell executes its functions and has a certain location in the organism for doing so, it reproduces only when necessary and finally the cells unite with each other in the making of the multicellular organism. Despite this, cells with altered social behavior appear in the organism: these cells, to one or another degree, remain ‘deaf” to the signals from other cells of the organism. These ‘deaf’ cells reproduce regardless of the signals sent by other cells and pervade into territory occupied by other tissues. These changes in separate cells are inheritable: the ‘anti-social’ behavior of these cells could be transferred in cell division to the daughter cells, this process repeating infinitely many times. In the last years, the study of the process of transformation of normal cells in cancerous ones has led to even more intriguing and unexpected result: in normal cells has been found a system for interaction with certain proteins named ‘system for guarding the genes’. This system protects the cells and the organism from mutations in the gene. A key role plays a protein called p53.