Cancer and its similarities to cellular automation

Ideas, thoughts, and resources from the permanently curious.

Living

World

Politics

Cancer and its similarities to cellular automation (1/23/06)

I can't for the life of me remember where I read this but I recently read a roundup of what cancer could be. One theory presented an interesting picture. It said that cells are always talking to each other, to do their jobs of course, and in the process of all of that one cell can occasionally get too many of the wrong signals and go haywire: turn cancerous. When this happens the immune system recognizes the problem cell, wrestles it out of place and eliminates it. The theory said this actually happens all the time in people, but we never come down with cancer because the immune system can cope with the problem. However, as we age the immune system is taxed by more and more problems, and eventually misses one of these errant cells.

When allowed to stay, the cell carries on its normal behavior, but in an abnormal way. The messages it is sending out to the other cells become mixed, and create an environment where other cells run the danger of turning into a cancer. So generation 1 has 1 cell that might reach 100 others for generation 2, and so on. Depending on how strong the immune system is, it might actually be able to fight some of these off. Also, depending on what the specific messaging malfunction is, it might spread fairly slowly or go really fast.

We can understand this using a game called Life32. If your not familiar with the game of Life, it is best explained here but is basically a game in which we set an initial pattern on a "board" by flicking on or off each position on the board and then program in some rules of interaction:

If two positions adjacent to each other are next to each other for long enough, separate them by one space and turn that space on. (i.e. they had a baby)
If one position is around for long enough, eliminate it. (i.e. it died of old age)
etc...

The game is then set into play, left to proceed through each "turn" automatically, and letting all of the positions interact with each other according to the rules. Some very interesting things come out of this, which I'll leave to others to find. Try googling for cellular automation patterns. What is amazing however is how much the eventual outcome can be changed by changing just one position. Here is the initial pattern created by Alan Hensel called "Bi-gun":

Start of the Bi-gun

Guns, in Life, are initial patterns that keep creating little bullets that are sent off in a direction. Here is the bi-gun pattern at the 300th generation:

300th generation of the Bi-gun

This pattern will repeat infinitely. It is a stable system. So lets zoom way in, and change just one position, and see what happens. Here is the new pattern:

Changed Bi-gun pattern

And at the 300th generation, here is how it looks:

The changed pattern at the 300th generation

So one small change destroyed the stability of the system. The analogy I'm drawing is that should the immune system fail to notice or fix that one change, the whole thing goes to hell. The nice thing about our bodies is that they aren't nearly as fickle as that; there are backup systems for the backup systems. However at some point the end result happens. How?

At this point the article made the pop-culture jump and suggested the cause for the decline in the immune system's abilities was inflammation, which at this point sounds entirely plausible given all the things that are being linked to inflammation. But what really needs to be said is that anything that the body is going to need to "take care of", be it a carcinogen, virus, or whatever, is going to take up more of our body's attention, when it needs to be paying attention to itself and looking for these little wayward cells.

So cancer prevention becomes a case of understanding the physiological changes that various environmental factors cause on the body, defense against those that can be considered harmful, and keeping the immune system healthy otherwise. Note that last one though: I suspect keeping our bodies in a bubble would be worse in the long run, so the temptation to overdo this would have to be managed.

The question then becomes, what do we do when cancer develops? We need to silence or correct the problem cells, which is currently done by cutting them out, or killing them off. Does this new, messaging based understanding of cancer change the possibilities though? It sounds a lot like another process that can go wrong in our bodies: the heartbeat. And when it goes wrong, such as through Ventricular Tachycardia, there are a number of treatments which center around correcting the problem. In some cases this is done by issuing a new baseline to the heart (they shock it), which is a bit like hitting a reset button.

So do cells have a reset button? Can they be "shocked" into resetting their messaging? Would they then purge the problem parts from themselves? The heart works off of electrical impulses while these cells work off of chemical signals, so I suspect this will be settled through pharmacology.

The problem is the cells aren't just being affected by one flick of the switch on the board. They are consistently sending out the wrong messages, so each cell needs to be treated for this problem. Each is sick. Understanding what messages it is sending out, and what it should be sending out, could lead to some novel treatments such as through blocking the excess signals or depriving the cell the chemicals it needs to send out that excessive signal, forcing it into correcting itself. While these ideas would be complex to carry out, the work being done in cloning and hibernation may vary well yield the ability to do these things. Forcing a cancerous cell into hibernation and then reawaking it might be enough to reset it. Likewise, were it to be weakened somehow, so it was more influenced by the messages coming in to it, it might correct the problem so that it could then be strengthened and return to normal function.

Another possibility could actually be putting a person in a bubble. If they are kept in an environment where the immune system can focus on that one problem, without worrying about new ones, it might get a chance to do its thing.