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PMID: 356869 Published · ppublish English Journal Article Review

Phenotypic diversity in experimental hepatomas: the concept of partially blocked ontogeny. The 10th Walter Hubert Lecture.

British journal of cancer ·Vol. 38 ·No. 1 ·1978-07-00 ·Pages 1-23

Potter VR

Abstract

Cancer cells should be seen not as exclusively a problem in cell proliferation, but rather as a problem combining the processes of proliferation and differentiation, hence the phrase introduced in 1968: "oncogeny is blocked ontogeny". Cancer tissues resemble foetal tissues in many ways but they differ from foetal tissue in being unable to "recapitulate the total programme leading to an orchestrated collection of organism-serving cells" that are programmed "to make the organ as adaptive as possible to the range of environmental variations in which it evolved". Citing the "Osgood Principle" from the 1950's, recent supporting evidence was described, in which the most mature differentiated cells exert positive and negative feedback upon the proliferation of their progenitor stem cells. Advanced examples in the haemopoietic series were drawn from the work of Sachs, Metcalf, Till and McCulloch, and Kurland and Moore. The blocked ontogeny hypothesis was further elaborated in the concept of "partially-blocked ontogeny", which is intended to describe a situation in which highly differentiated slowly growing tumours contain some cells which have left the proliferating pool to differentiate along the normal pathway, but are blocked somewhere short of the final organism-serving state, in harmony with earlier suggestions by Osgood, by Pierce, and by Sachs.

MeSH Terms
Amino Acids/metabolism Animals Cell Cycle Cell Differentiation Cell Division Cells, Cultured Clone Cells Feedback Hematopoietic System/cytology Liver/cytology,metabolism Liver Neoplasms, Experimental/genetics,metabolism,ultrastructure Mice Models, Biological Phenotype Rats
Chemicals
Amino Acids
Authors & Affiliations
1 authors, click to expand affiliations / ORCID
Potter V R
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57 references, click to expand
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Article Info
Journal
British journal of cancer
Abbr.
Br J Cancer
ISSN
0007-0920
DOI
10.1038/bjc.1978.159
Published
1978-07-00
Pages
1-23
Language
English
Region
England
NLM ID
0370635
PMCID
PMC2009671
Subset
IM
External Links
PubMed source DOI: 10.1038/bjc.1978.159 PMC Full Text View journal details
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