Firefighter findings

Background: Inflammation is increasingly recognized as an important component of tumorigenesis, although the mechanisms involved are not fully characterized. The invasive capacity of cancers is reflected in the classic metastatic cascade: tumor (T), node (N) and metastasis (M). However, this staging system for cancer would also have a tumoral biological significance. Presentation of the hypothesis: To integrate the mechanisms that control the inflammatory response in the actual staging system of cancer. It is considered that in both processes of inflammation and cancer, three successive phenotypes are presented that represent the expression of trophic functional systems of increasing metabolic complexity for using oxygen. Testing the hypothesis: While a malignant tumor develops it express phenotypes that also share the inflammatory response such as: an ischemic phenotype (anoxic-hypoxic), a leukocytic phenotype with anaerobic glycolysis and migration, and an angiogenic phenotype with hyperactivity of glycolytic enzymes, tumor proliferation and metastasis, and cachexia of the host. The increasing metabolic complexity of the tumor cell to use oxygen allows for it to be released, migrate and proliferate, thus creating structures of growing complexity. Implication of the hypothesis: One aim of cancer gene therapy could be the induction of oxidative phosphorylation, the last metabolic step required by inflammation in order to differentiate the tissue that it produces. Background The link between inflammation and the development of cancer has been recognized since 1863, when Rudolf Virchow discovered leukocytes in neoplastic tissues and made the first relation between inflammation and cancer [1]. Since then, a number of cancers have been linked to inflammatory origins [2] and in many cases it has been considered how the tumor microenvironment highly resembles an inflammatory site [3,4]. Nowadays, the causal relationship between inflammation and cancer is widely accepted. Inflammation is increasingly recognized as an important component of tumorigenesis, although the mechanisms involved are not fully characterized [4-6]. Tumors can be noninvasive or benign, because they are cured easily by simple removal, and invasive -also called malignant or cancers that invariably kill their host if untreated [7]. This invasive ability of cancers is reflected in the classic metastatic cascade, which is staged according to the volume of the primary tumor and its depth of invasion (T stage), the number and the volume of occupied lymph Published: 16 April 2007 Molecular Cancer 2007, 6:29 doi:10.1186/1476-4598-6-29 Received: 8 March 2007 Accepted: 16 April 2007 This article is available from: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/6/1/29 © 2007 Arias et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.