Cancer comes from within us. It is a disease of abnormal growth of the cells that make up the organs of our body. To be lethal, in addition to abnormal growth, cancer cells must acquire the ability to invade other organs and spread throughout the body. Understanding the key features or hallmarks of cancer is a basis for designing treatments designed to fight it. The basis features that all cancers share are:
1) The ability to grow in a self-sufficient manner, regardless of the body’s needs.
2) Resistance to the natural anti-growth instructions from the body.
3) The ability to grow and evade natural death; in a manner of speaking, cancer cells are immortal. When grown in a laboratory, and as long as they are fed, cancer cells grow forever.
4) The ability to invade and spread throughout the body
5) The ability to grow its own blood supply.
To read the original article that proposed these hallmarks of cancer go to: