Cell signaling pathways decoded
An abundance of research has demonstrated that initiation of disease, its perpetualtion and eventual establish of a chronic, inflammatory phenotype, occurs at the cell level. Within the cell and its immediated environment, the body’s awareness and reaction to disease begins with changes in the cell’s behavior, its gene expression, cell activity and structure, secretion of a variety of chemical compounds, among other activities. These signals interact with the cell’s immediate environment to influence the cell’s function and that of adjacent cells. This “signaling” occurring within the immediate cellular disease environment, or the tissue microenvironment, has revealed distinct pathways which correspond to specific disease characteristics. Characteristics that are dynamic and are direct consequences of an action-reaction process, a signaling cascade.. For cancers, the disease characteristics include proliferation, survival, invasion, etc. They are the “hallmarks” which define cancer in medicine today. Signal Physiology is working to decode these pathways to establish a hieracrchy of signaling and the resulting associated cellular functions, or cell physiology. Complexity in cell signaling is often presented as chaos, with signaling that is redundanct, reactive, self=sustaining, with feed-back and feed-forward characteristics. By understanding the genesis of disease signaling, which begins with chronic cell stress and the eventual conversion of cell metabolism (Warburg effect), we are establishing a more precise definition of disease, its diagnosis and real-time assessment of disease, at its source, the cellular microenvironment.