Just a quick post to mention a new piece of research recently published in the British Journal of Cancer about the reversibility of apoptosis.

Apoptosis is a cellular mechanism that ends up in cell death in a programmed controlled manner. It serves a number of purposes (without it, we would not have fingers that are separated one from the other). It is also a powerful cancer prevention mechanism. So much so that evasion of apoptosis is considered one of the milestones sine qua non tumour progression is not possible.

The normal mechanism of apoptosis involves a number of stages and it is assumed that there is a point of no return beyond which the cell has no other choice but to die. That has been question by this research as they found that some tumour cells are capable of coming back from that point of no return under certain circumstances (e.g., when the process has not reached the later stage in which the genetic material is degraded). This is important as it shows an alternative mechanism by which tumour cells can survive without necessarily requiring a disruption on the apoptotic pathway and can help explain how some tumour cells are more resistant to chemotherapy than others.

And I have the feeling that this will not be the last discovery on how tumour cells manage to escape from the various mechanisms put in place to hinder uncontrolled growth.