Cancer Cells Quotes

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them.

When in organism there are cancer cells, they have to be removed, not helped because they're "so young" and "so creative".

I had just finished playing a doctor in Doctors' and I had had to tell somebody that they had cancer. In that moment I thought, He's doing what I did!' We sat down and he said, I'm sorry, Mr. Timothy, but I've got bad news.' I thought, Oh!' He told me that they had found cancerous cells, but not a lot.

Such a strange thing. What was terrible for a healthy fetus has been wonderful at defeating the cancer cells.

What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

I am not a scientist. I have never analyzed the far reaches of the solar system through the lens of a telescope nor scrutinized cancer cells under a microscope.

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

Tobacco smoke contains chemicals that weaken the body's immune system, making it more susceptible to disease and handicapping its ability to destroy cancer cells.

You've got to get away from the idea cancer is a disease to be cured. It's not a disease really. The cancer cell is your own body, your own cells, just misbehaving and going a bit wrong, and you don't have to cure cancer. You don't have to get rid of all those cells. Most people have cancer cells swirling around inside them all the time and mostly they don't do any harm, so what we want to do is prevent the cancer from gaining control. We just want to keep it in check for long enough that people die of something else.

I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

The thing with cancer is that it's usually the chemo rather than the disease itself that makes the patient feel so ill, particularly at the start.

Cancer cells have had so many other things go wrong with them, genetic, non-genetic changes, that those cells, one of the things they then get selected for is that they have lots of telomerase because now the telomeres in those cells get maintained.

Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in.

If we were able to put every single solitary cancer cell that has a genomic - had their genome done in one place, we have the computing capacity to go in and look at what are the similarities and dissimilarities that make them work and don't work. And every expert will tell you, it is probably gonna exponentially increase the capacity to be able to find, A, cures, B, vaccines, and C, turn some cancers into chronic diseases, rather than it cost you your life.

Cancer cells have a lot of other things that are really wrong with them, and we should never forget that these are cells that have become deaf to all the signals that the body sends out, such as you can multiply a certain amount, you can be in a certain place in the body, where to stay, where to move, and so on.

I'm taking special treatments for the cancer in my brain and in my liver. Part of the liver was removed, and they did the treatment on four places in my brain with radiation. And now I'm taking a long-term medicine that stimulates my own immune system to fight against cancer.

I believe that we are going to have a much deeper appreciation of what kinds of abnormalities in cancer cells and in the surrounding cells that feed and respond to cancers are vulnerabilities that will allow us to make better predictions of which kinds of drugs will work to treat these cancers.

It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.

When are we going to say cancer is cured? I'm not sure when that will happen, if that will happen because cancer is a very slippery disease and it involves a vast number of cells in the body and those cells are continually mutating.

The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous.