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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.
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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.