The Hallmarks of Cancer

After a quarter century of rapid advances, cancer research has generated a rich and complex body of knowledge, revealing cancer to be a disease involving dynamic changes in the genome. The foundation has been set in the discovery of mutations that produce oncogenes with dominant gain of function and tumor suppressor genes with recessive loss of function; both classes of cancer genes have been identified through their alteration in human and animal cancer cells and by their elicitation of cancer phenotypes in experimental models (Bishop and Weinberg 1996).