Questions tagged [cancer]

A malignant group of uncontrollably dividing cells that form a tumour. Questions regarding (proto)oncogenes and tumour-suppressor genes should also use this tag.

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Why don’t all HPV strains cause cancers?

There are roughly a dozen high risk HPV strains responsible for cervical cancer. These strains promote hyperplasia of infected cells by encoding E6 and E7, which potently antagonize tumor suppressor ...
哲煜黄's user avatar
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Can a dividing cell that skipped DNA replication become cancerous?

Let's assume that a cell fails to replicate its DNA during the S Phase of the cell cycle. Let's also assume that the appropriate CDKs are inactive (perhaps due to mutation or lack of cyclin proteins ...
theforestecologist's user avatar
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How do evolutionary forces influence the number of copies of the p53 gene?

p53 is an important tumor suppressor gene. Around 50% of cancers are associated with loss of function in p53. Humans have only two copies of p53 in their genome (one on each homologous chromosome). ...
PejoPhylo's user avatar
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What's the difference between proliferation and diffusion when talking about changes in tumor density?

Cell proliferation and cell diffusion seem to be important quantities to estimate when trying to understand or measure tumor growth, but I don't really understand a) the difference between them or b) ...
user930112's user avatar
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Escaping resource limitations during tumor evolution

In their discussion of the importance of r- and K-selection on tumors, Aktipis et al. (2013; figure 3) provide the following illustration of a hypothetical cancer growth curve: In it, you can see ...
Artem Kaznatcheev's user avatar
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What are the sizes of the cells that make up human hair?

The question is in the title, but I'll explain why the question arose. I'm curious about the rates that various cells in the body divide, and have found various information relating to this, but ...
user1247's user avatar
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Targeted gene sequencing and specialist analysis compared to WGS and DYI searches

There seem to be a lot of "genetic consulting" services that focus on things like cancer, with a modus operandi of: Do targeted gene sequencing (usually on a few tumor suppressor genes ...
George's user avatar
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How a pathologist would analyse this H&E image?

I am working on a project which involves writing computer software to analyse histological images. A typical image looks like this: It is a Hematoxylin and Eosin stained biopsy of breast cancer ...
mercury0114's user avatar
3 votes
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How are oncogenes targeted for therapy?

How would oncogenes be targeted for therapy and are there any examples of existing therapies for such cancers if the gene was upregulated (i) as a result of copy number variation and (ii) due to ...
staphyneedsme's user avatar
2 votes
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65 views

Why are deformable cancer cells associated with being more malignant or dangerous?

So I was watching a lecture that talked about circulating tumor cells/cancer stem cells, and the professor mentioned that deformable cancer cells tend to be more dangerous to us. Why is this so? Does ...
Maia Mukamal's user avatar
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Contrast Fluids in MRI: Which tissues "glow" first?

I am a bioinformatic and data scientist in progress, working on my Master Thesis about prostate cancer. Now I am at that point, I have a strong guessing, that contrast fluids in magnetic resonance ...
Allerleirauh's user avatar
2 votes
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Difference between IC50 and Michaelis-Menten constant

I am new to biology, and getting to know the term IC50, I found that there is a connection between IC50 and Michaelis-Menten constant by the Cheng-Prusoff equation $K_{i}=\frac{\mathrm{IC}_{50}}{1+\...
LOVEMATH's user avatar
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Weight of fresh vs frozen tumours

I have some mouse tumours that have been snap frozen in liquid nitrogen following an in vivo study, and I thought it might be interesting to also determine the weight of the tumours. I was wondering ...
tolo9397's user avatar
2 votes
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134 views

Why do BRAF mutations appear more in skin cutaneous melanoma?

When looking at the tissue expression of the BRAF protein it seems that BRAF is regularly expressed in almost all of the tissues. There is elevated expression in tissues like the Testis and the ...
rafiko1's user avatar
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Can a regulator genes be more highly expressed when it has more places to bind?

I am doing some research on small cell lung cancer and, from what I have found, many tumors show high levels of ASCL1, which is a regulator for neuroendocrine cell differentiation. However, no papers ...
Ryan David Ward's user avatar
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234 views

How can I download histological slide from Cancer Digital Slide Archive

Could you tell me if it possible and how to download images data from http://cancer.digitalslidearchive.net ? Thank you.
FrancescoP's user avatar
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101 views

Can HBV pseudotyped oncolytic viruses be used to treat hepatocellular carcinoma?

Chronic hepatitis B is the leading cause of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Oncolytic virotherapy (OV) is an emerging tool to treat cancer. However, one challenge of OV is that our immune system may ...
Ballistics's user avatar
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Is blood donation risky for patients with MGUS?

Monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS) is often considered a pre-cancerous condition. Blood donors with MGUS are typically advised to discontinue blood donation as their blood may be ...
Giuseppe Biondi-Zoccai's user avatar
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Can telomere length maintenance be an answer to increased life span of human beings?

Telomere shortening may prevent the development of cancer in human aged cells by limiting the number of cell divisions. However, shortening of telomeres impairs immune function and thus might also ...
Fuka26 Eri's user avatar
2 votes
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530 views

Can cancerous cells reach the Hayflick limit?

This may be a stupid question, but I've been wondering. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres on the chromosomes shorten. If this goes on for long enough, the chromosomes will no longer have ...
Sir Cumference's user avatar
2 votes
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394 views

Why are sarcomas rare compared to carcinomas?

A sarcoma (from the Greek σάρξ sarx meaning "flesh") is a cancer that arises from transformed cells of mesenchymal origin. Thus, malignant tumors made of cancellous bone, cartilage, fat, muscle, ...
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Why lactate inhibits growth (or enhances death rate)?

Extracellular lactate tends to inhibit cellular growth or enhance cell death. This happens in the vicinity of tumors and in cell cultures. See for example this reference: Ozturk, Sadettin S., Mark R....
a06e's user avatar
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Effect of cellular phone towers on human health

We live in world of mobiles, tablets, PCs and other electronic gadgets. We are continuously exposed to radio frequencies and other cellular frequencies. Generally, all of these waves are very low ...
Dexter's user avatar
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2 votes
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Subtypes of Acute myeloid leukemia

I am a computer scientist with no biological background and working on analyzing lab results of patients with Acute myeloid leukemia. They have been tagged with following subtypes of AML: AML with ...
HappyJennifer's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
588 views

Best way to automatically link Gene Entrez ID with Gene Symbol in TCGA

I am trying to figure out how to link Gene Entrez ID with Gene Symbol, for TCGA dataset. So far, I have found this ftp directory with Gene info updated daily. But, for Entrez ID 728661, I have found ...
gc5's user avatar
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A number of questions regarding chemotaxis assay using PBMCs

In our lab we would like to study the chemotaxis of PBMCs towards conditioned medium obtained following treatment of cancer cells with different compounds. My questions are regarding the method of ...
Alexandra's user avatar
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immunotherapy - how would the inhibitor detect

It's a known fact that if PD-L1 happens to be on cancer cells, it will signall off to the T-cell's receptor(PD-1) to turn off its activation, resulting in a fact ...
Giorgi Lagidze's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
40 views

cancer cell - antigen presenting cell

We all know that if normal cell contains virus inside it, normal cell has mechanism inside it that can detect that it has abnormality inside(virus) and what it will do is present the virus's protein(...
Giorgi Lagidze's user avatar
1 vote
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30 views

Is deleting two or three consecutive nucleotides and inserting exactly two or three back more common than two or three consecutive SNP?

I am looking at cancer mutations. I found that some of the mutations are e.g. c.1251_1252delGGinsTT c.151_152delGGinsTC c.351_352delCAinsTT I wonder if these are indeed two consecutive single ...
William Wong's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
42 views

Calculation of drug efficacy- mathematical biology approach

I am participating in a mathematical biology project. I would like to discuss the following problem: Let A be a drug such that $x_{o}$ chemical units of it kills 12% of $y$ cells per 1 day, I would ...
LOVEMATH's user avatar
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29 views

Chromosome Deletion Notation in Cancers

The cancer literature often refers to the deletion of certain sections of a chromosome (e.g. "17p del" or "Del(17p)" for the deletion of chromosome 17's p-arm.) Does this mean both ...
Erich Peterson's user avatar
1 vote
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53 views

How exactly does chemotherapy cause anemia?

I’ve been trying to figure this out for the past few hours but I still can’t find something as in depth as I’m looking for. So far all I’ve found is that chemo drugs kill bone marrow cells and some ...
user62783's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
40 views

When cancer is detectable, how many sub-clones are there at that stage?

I have read somewhere that cancer is detectable when the number of cells reaches $10^7 - 10^9$, which probably varies according to the specific tumor. At this early stage, what is the expected number ...
Paichu's user avatar
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Which chemokines are being produced by melanocytes?

I am looking into Vitiligo it's an autoimmune disease that results in apoptosis of melanocytes due to misfolded protein accumulation. It also dramatically increases breast cancer rates (600 times) ...
Matas Vaitkevicius's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
71 views

Fluoroquinolone mitochondrial and genomic DNA adduct

What could be possible consequences of covalent bond mitochondrial and genomic DNA adduct by Fluoroquinolones, our study was done by Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Study NFP. All 50+ participates who took ...
Jerzy Tyszkowski's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
28 views

Why is CLL B-Cell leukemia t(12;21) more responsive to chemotherapy?

Chronic Lympoid Leukemia targeting B-Cell (with the particular translocation mutation on chromosome 12 and 21) is known to be more responsive to chemotherapy. Is there a known molecular mechanism for ...
A. Radek Martinez's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
32 views

How does latency in carcinogenisis differ from the effect of chance?

Most chemically induced cancers seem to have a long latency between exposure to the carcinogen and expression of the disease. Mesothelioma typically 30-40 years, bladder cancer about 20 years, for ...
Isaacson's user avatar
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What is(are) the mechanism(s) that stop cells from fusing in vivo?

I just learned about the phenomenon of 'cell fusion' in which two diploid somatic cells can combine into some aneuploid cell in vitro and proceed to proliferate in culture. Apparently this can even ...
Diio's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
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Treatment validation on mouse models

I am struggling to set up a project proposal for validation of a known treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer in mouse models. I want to see how SNPs in patients contribute to their drug ...
Danae Velts's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
27 views

Characterising mechanisms responsible for generating structural variants

I have a high-quality set of structural variant breakpoints from tumour/normal WGS data, and I am interested in digging into the various mechanisms that might be involved in each event. There are ...
fugu's user avatar
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What is the best solvent for Mutagen X?

Many solvents can be used for mutagen X (3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-5H-furan-2-one), however, long-term stability is not specified. Which would be the best solvent for long-term storage? ...
user33010's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
99 views

How do neuroblastoma cells divide? Is it via mitosis?

My name is Daniel and I'm 17 years old. I am currently designing a study to investigate compounds that potentially increase the replication of neural cells. I will be using neuroblastoma cells and ...
Daniel's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
205 views

Why is RAS undruggable?

Why can't mutated RAS get inactivated by GTPase? Why don't we have any inhibitors for RAS-GTP binding? Why is RAS undruggable? How can mutated RAS be inactivated? I had been researching on the topic ...
Parth Raghav's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
52 views

How does carcinoma enter into blood or lymphatic vessels?

When carcinoma begins to metastasize, it enters into blood vessel or lymphatic vessel to migrate to the site of metastasis. In that case, although I think breaking down the basement membrane is ...
ironKUMA's user avatar
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1 vote
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do cancer cells respond to EM fields?

Do cancer cells respond to electromagnetic fields? If so, can someone please provide reliable information as to how they behave in such fields? Do you suppose the growth rate to be affected in any way ...
Lelouch's user avatar
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1 vote
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73 views

Do Tumor-Infiltrating T Cells Experience Any Prolonged Effects Due To Hypoxia After They Return To Normoxia?

Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) therapy using tumor-inflitrating lymphocytes (TIL) is at the cutting edge of immuno-oncology treatments involving metastatic melanoma and other indications (1). The idea ...
CKM's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
91 views

Has Staphylococcus aureus ever been used against cancer?

Treating inoperable tumors with bacteria appears to be very effective, albeit being toxic to the patient as well. Has (live attenuated) Staphylococcus aureus ever been used against cancer? If the ...
Biology nerd's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
180 views

How to construct tumor phylogenetic tree?

I would like to know if anyone has tried any software that constructs tumor evolution trees where the trunks represent the common mutations and the private alterations are noted on each branch. I can ...
civy's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
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Pathogenesis of Cardiac Atypia?

I am studying the pathogenesis of atypia in cardiac cells where the etiology is most commonly irritation or infection and where the precancerous risk depends on the context of diagnosis. This fact ...
Léo Léopold Hertz 준영's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
565 views

Where do I find microsatellite instability annotation for TCGA data

I have searched through the TCGA data portal but I was unable to find MSI annotation for TCGA Colon Adenocarcinoma (COAD) and Rectum Adenocarcinoma (READ) datasets. I am searching for the annotation ...
gc5's user avatar
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