Auhtors: Hanahan D, Weinberg RA
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81683-9
Abstract
After a quarter century of rapid advances, cancer research has generated a rich and complex body of knowledge, revealing cancer to be a disease involving dynamic changes in the genome. The foundation has been set in the discovery of mutations that produce oncogenes with dominant gain of function and tumor suppressor genes with recessive loss of function; both classes of cancer genes have been identified through their alteration in human and animal cancer cells and by their elicitation of cancer phenotypes in experimental models.
Some would argue that the search for the origin and treatment of this disease will continue over the next quarter century in much the same manner as it has in the recent past, by adding further layers of complexity to a scientific literature that is already complex almost beyond measure. But we anticipate otherwise: those researching the cancer problem will be practicing a dramatically different type of science than we have experienced over the past 25 years. Surely much of this change will be apparent at the technical level. But ultimately, the more fundamental change will be conceptual.
We foresee cancer research developing into a logical science, where the complexities of the disease, described in the laboratory and clinic, will become understandable in terms of a small number of underlying principles. Some of these principles are even now in the midst of being codified. We discuss one set of them in the present essay: rules that govern the transformation of normal human cells into malignant cancers. We suggest that research over the past decades has revealed a small number of molecular, biochemical, and cellular traits—acquired capabilities—shared by most and perhaps all types of human cancer. Our faith in such simplification derives directly from the teachings of cell biology that virtually all mammalian cells carry a similar molecular machinery regulating their proliferation, differentiation, and death.
Several lines of evidence indicate that tumorigenesis in humans is a multistep process and that these steps reflect genetic alterations that drive the progressive transformation of normal human cells into highly malignant derivatives. Many types of cancers are diagnosed in the human population with an age-dependent incidence implicating four to seven rate-limiting, stochastic events. Pathological analyses of a number of organ sites reveal lesions that appear to represent the intermediate steps in a process through which cells evolve progressively from normalcy via a series of premalignant states into invasive cancers.
These observations have been rendered more concrete by a large body of work indicating that the genomes of tumor cells are invariably altered at multiple sites, having suffered disruption through lesions as subtle as point mutations and as obvious as changes in chromosome complement. Transformation of cultured cells is itself a multistep process: rodent cells require at least two introduced genetic changes before they acquire tumorigenic competence, while their human counterparts are more difficult to transform. Transgenic models of tumorigenesis have repeatedly supported the conclusion that tumorigenesis in mice involves multiple rate-limiting steps (Bergers et al., 1998; see Oncogene, 1999, R. DePinho and T. E. Jacks, volume 18[38], pp. 5248–5362). Taken together, observations of human cancers and animal models argue that tumor development proceeds via a process formally analogous to Darwinian evolution, in which a succession of genetic changes, each conferring one or another type of growth advantage, leads to the progressive conversion of normal human cells into cancer cells.
Keywords: cancer
