To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cell’s launch as a journal (can you believe it’s already 50 years?), there’s a very nice paper in the current issue of Cell that gives an update on the seminal paper ”The Hallmarks of Cancer”, written by Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg in 2000.  Everyone who aspires to be a cancer researcher or oncologist would know of this paper and in the paper Hanahan and Weinberg distilled down to just 6 mechanisms or capabilities that cancer cells must have to create trouble and mischief.  In 2011, this dynamic duo of Hanrahan and Weinberg updated the list of mechanisms or capabilities from 6 to 10 as our knowledge of cancer mechanisms increased and improved – this being ”The Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation”.  Now in 2024, we have a multi-author paper spearheaded by Charlie Swanton of The Crick Institute that follows on from these 2 papers.

In this Cell perspective, there is an acknowledgement that cancer is indeed a very clever and cunning disease.  It may well be that there are logical mechanisms and capabilities that make a cell cancerous and for which cancer drug developers have latched on to design drugs that have made a difference in treating these cancers.  In the process of learning about these 6, and then 10 mechanisms, we have also realised that there is much we don’t know.  That our knowledge is incomplete.  And it is sobering that in this paper ”Embracing cancer complexity: Hallmarks of systemic disease”, there are now clouds of complexity that need to be factored into how cancer develops.  What we do, what we eat, what we breathe in, etc, etc really matters in the development of cancer.  It is important to acknowledge that cancer is a very complex set of diseases and a more holistic appreciation would therefore require us to embrace its complexity.

Go on, have a read – all 3 papers are here.

READ THE ARTICLE:  https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2824%2900175-2