Unlike the leopard, cancers do 'change their spots' and thereby resist treatment
Recent posts from Cancer Ecology Commentary have focused on understanding how the epigenome, the set of DNA and chromatin modifications regulating cell gene expression, informs our understand of the connection between intrinsic influences from oncogenes and the extrinsic effects arising from the environment in explaining carcinogenesis. Using a model adopted from developmental biology to explain the emergence of cell lineages, the role of lineage plasticity, the capability of altering phenotypic character or even reversing cell differentiation toward an undifferentiated state, was highlighted. That reversibility allows for lineage transition, a necessary means of responding to organ injury but is also subject to stochastic perturbations in the epigenetic regulation controlling cell fate permitting lineage infidelity as a first step toward neoplastic transformation. A question then occurs - what experimental evidence is there to support such pathologic lineage plasticity in the...