Abstract
With a previous paper (Niu & Wang, 1995), a general, hypothetical outline of the mechanism of carcinogenesis was proposed. With reference to the fact of starvation-induced hypermutation in micro-organisms, we propose that the hypoxia commonly seen in the cells at the centre of solid tumours might also result in hypermutation, and then p53-dependent programmed cell death. Like the apparently adaptive mutations in micro-organisms, only those genes (e.g. p53) that enable the cells to escape from apoptosis may be selected.
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Niu, D.K., Chen, JK. Ideas in Theoretical Biology Origin of Cancerous Cells from Tumours. Acta Biotheor 46, 379–381 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1001803420183
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1001803420183