how do PC cells become smart if they dont have a brain

PC cells are actually little mini space alien ships. They have these computers that constantly search for news ways to be destructive.

The truth is out there! What are you doing here?

Andrew

ddyss,

I know I am often guilty of anthropomorphizing cancer by using terms like "outsmart." It's just a figure of speech. Cancer has a couple of characteristics that are not true of normal cells. One is "genetic breakdown." It mutates easily, and switches genes on that should be switched off, and it switches genes off that should be switched on. The other is that it clones itself more rapidly than ordinary cells. These two advantages allow it to evolve into more resistant types pretty quickly. A therapy you try to kill one kind of majority cancer cell with certain genetic features won't kill another kind of minority cancer cell with some other genetic feature. The minority ones that are left alive will rapidly multiply and become the new dominant type. In that way, the cancer has "outsmarted" the therapy.

ddyss said...
what makes PC cells hormone resistant

Its complicated. I think it works this way. Others, please correct.

Basic: Testosterone binds to and turn on the androgen receptors (a protein) in PC cells which drives the cancer growth.

HT work by stopping the body from making testosterone, but it is not 100% effective because:

- some PC cells have androgen receptors that are hypersensitive and since the HT don't make the testosterone level to be true zero those hypersensitive cells continues to grow with the small levels of testosterone that remains in the body.

- after a while, some PC cells start to make their own form of testosterone, that turn on the androgen receptors and promote cancer growth and then HT doesn't help any longer.

- other complicated mechanism including gene mutations, see Allens post

Brains are way overrated.

Fairwind said...
Cancer cells multiply very quickly..So they can adapt to changes in their environment very quickly..We have treatments that can kill 99%, 99.5% of the cancer cells..We go into remission...But the few that escaped death, the ones that were different enough to survive the treatment, they start multiplying and THESE cells are very hard to deal with. They have become immune to ADT, Zytiga, Xtandi and the Chemo agents...It's doesn't take that many replications and they got you...

Seems to me, the only way to deal with them (cancer cells) is to train our own immune systems to recognize and destroy them, like any other infectious disease..Here is where success will be found, not with drugs or radiation that always leave survivors that bide their time but eventually become strong and overwhelming and destroy us..

This is closer to the answer to the question "how do they do it without brains", IMO, than any kind of "evolution". These little brainless creatures do not develop new abilities or become a new species, so much as some are not killed by the original treatment, probably one reason for that being that they were already resistant. With bacteria that some say supposedly "evolve" into a drug resistant strain, this just means that the ones not killed in the 1st place now have less competition for resources from both the other "bad" bacteria, and the "good" bacteria, which were also killed off. So, they are able to grow at an amazing rate, and now the dominate strain of bacteria is the one we can not kill. I would not be surprised if something similar goes on with our PC cells that original treatment does not manage to kill off, especially those that are not done away with by ADT and RT. More or less.

But the question about how something without a brain figures out how to evade treatment and outsmart drugs is a good question that could be applied to many other things than PC, IMO.

In other words, they evolve. As the cells inside a tumour mutate, they become ever more genetically diverse.

There is a good write up I found
here

"Cancer has an innate ability to adapt to its surroundings. As it progresses, cancer cells tend to change, morphing to a point where the differences between tumor cells can be dramatic. That’s why some researchers believe late-stage prostate cancer is more accurately described as a mix of cancer cell types."

Genetic diversity is "the spice of life, it's the substrate upon which natural selection acts ...