How Do Tumors Grow?

Posted by rob on September 30, 2011 under Uncategorized | Comments are off for this article

On a sweltering August evening in 2009 Pat Elliott noticed that her feet seemed swollen. Because she had been standing for hours while teaching a workshop in Phoenix, she was not surprised. “I thought it was the heat,” she says. But her feet hurt, too, so Elliott decided to play it safe and called her doctor, who suggested she come in for some tests. Days later the marketing professional learned that she had developed an uncommon form of blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).Elliott’s cancer is the result of a genetic change that arose in one or more stem cells in her bone marrow. (Normally these stem cells give rise to various blood cells in the body.) The defect caused the stem cells and their progeny to produce an abnormal enzyme known as Bcr-Abl. This…
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