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The biology of cancer

Published on January 31, 2019   54 min

A selection of talks on Oncology

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0:00
Hi. My name is Dr. Pardo, a team leader at the Division of Cancer at Imperial College and today, I'm going to tell you about the biology of cancer. This is a basic lecture on cancer biology, so this is not going to go extensively through all the subjects relating to cancer biology, but just introduce some notions that I hope you will find interesting.
0:26
So, what exactly shall we touch on in this lecture? The first thing that I have to say is that we are assuming here that you already know about cancer as a disease, meaning what is cancer versus other diseases. Therefore, what we're going to more specifically focus on here today is to present general hallmarks of cancer and explain how these phenotypes relate to cancer development, explain also how cancer is initiated through activations of particular genes called oncogenes and deactivation of other genes called tumor suppressors. We're going to also explain what makes this gene so special as compared to other genes in the genome, and show the different ways that cancer cells use to rewire cell signaling in order to promote tumor development. Also, I will introduce the idea that a tumor is not only about the cancer cell, but also about the microenvironment so what surrounds the tumor. Finally, I'm going to give you examples of how we use this knowledge to develop a new therapeutic strategy, but also what the challenges are in current therapy development.

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