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The Cellular Basis of Cancer

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Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide as it can develop in almost any organ or tissue. Significant advances in understanding the cellular basis of cancer and the underlying biological mechanisms of tumour has been vastly improved in the recent years (Jiang et al. 1994). Cancer is a genetic disease which requires a series of mutation during mitosis to develop, its characteristics can be associated with their ability to grow and divide abnormal cells uncontrollable while in the mean time invade and cause nearby blood vessels to serve its need. Even though many people are affected by cancer today, the abilities which cancer cells have make it hard to find a single effective treatment for cancer. The focus of research now lies in developing drugs which target cancer cells in the hope to cure cancer once and for all.

There have been extraordinary progresses in identifying cancer at the cellular level and the question of how cancer cells develop are no longer a secret. Although there is many different types of cancer and almost every tissue can turn into malignancies, the basic processes of how cancer arises are very similar. While normal body cells follow the orderly path of cell cycle and only reproduce when instructed to do so, cancer cells violate the schedule and ignore instructions, it fails to follow the orderly enzymatic reaction which is responsible for the deletion of cells with damaged DNA (Kerr et al. 1994). Cancer cells enter the cell cycle repeatedly until it will eventually disrupt the function of tissues and organs that are essential to the organism (Weinberg 1996). Not all types of cancer are fatal, benign cancer is a type of cancer which stays in one location only, in another word it will not metastases. Benign cancer can be cured easily by using the simple technique of removal by a surgeon.

In contrast to benign caner, malign

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