Sarah S Knox and Richard HW Funk
Oncology and Biophysics: A Need for Integration
The mainstream view of cancer as a mutated cell that has become dysfunctional and multiplies out of control (the somatic mutation model) is much less consistent with extant data than the context dependent model. The latter focuses on interactions between the cell and its surrounding environment as the initiator and driver of malignancy. The genome wide epigenetic changes that precede cancer and confer risk for cancer, strongly suggest that multiple systems are affected by gene expression changes before tumors even manifest. This provides a partial explanation for cancer’s ability to adapt to targeted therapies as well as an explanation for the failure of multiple DNA repair mechanisms and other defenses(e.g. apoptosis, immune defenses) to eliminate mutated cells.
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