Course Description: The Cell Biology of Cancer
This CP level course focuses on understanding cancer as a cellular disease, and the challenges of diagnosing and treating it given the needs and limitations of the human body and its cells. The course is designed to be a CP level course offering (not honors).
Biology learning targets addressed in this course:
Understands how mitosis creates somatic cells.
Understands how the parts of a cell work together to enable an organism to function.
Understands how the use of enzymes give cells precise control over their chemical reactions.
Understands how membrane structure influences the ways in which cells interact with their environment.
Understands the structure and function of DNA and the flow of information in a cell, from DNA to RNA to proteins.
The purpose of this unit is to engage students on the topic of cancer, by showing them how they can be personally impacted by cancer and by explaining how major questions in the cancer field impact our ability to treat cancer successfully. Students learn about how we know what causes cancer and how their own personal choices can affect their likelihood of developing cancer.
This lesson engages students on the idea that cancer is relevant to young people, not simply a disease of old age. It uses Steve Jobs as a case study example of how a cancer that manifests clinical symptoms as a person ages may actually have arisen when the person was young. Students will learn when Jobs’ pancreatic cancer developed and when it spread to his liver and lung and hence evaluate whether his choice at the age of 56 to delay pancreatic surgery for several months actually impacted his life expectancy. They will also discuss how early exposure to carcinogens may have impacted his cancer development.
Students will be able to
– Demonstrate why cancer is relevant to young people.
– Identify lifestyle choices that may lead to increased risk of developing cancer later in life.
– Relate how metastasis is significant in cancer mortality.
This unit reviews how cancer has been viewed through history. Students will learn how historical context has always influenced how cancer has been perceived and will investigate the technological breakthroughs that have led to our understanding of cancer biology. Students will come to appreciate how what was once a death sentence, is now often treatable.
Students will be able to:
– Describe how our ideas of cancer have evolved from initial descriptions of a disease of fluids, to our current understanding that it is a disease of cells.
– Explain how breakthroughs in technology have affected cancer research.
– Describe how historical context has limited cancer research.
This unit introduces students to the idea that carcinogens can cause cancer by damaging the DNA of genes involved in cell growth. Students will learn about the different assays that are used to evaluate carcinogenicity of substances that we encounter in our daily lives.
Students will be able to
– Identify which genes need to be mutated to cause unregu-lated cell growth.
– Define the term ‘carcinogen’ and explain how carcinogens can act to mutate DNA.
– Explain how the Ames test identifies carcinogens.
– Explain the importance of dose and potency to whether a compound is a carcinogen in humans.
In this unit students learn to prove that a pathogen is responsible for an infectious disease, using Koch’s postulates. In this lesson, students understand that Koch’s postulates cannot be applied to carcinogens that are not infective agents, and that it is impossible to establish causation when dealing with diseases of unknown and complex origins such as cancer. Instead, students will learn about Hill’s postulates which use correlation to determine the likelihood of a particular agent being a carcinogen. They will use Hill’s postulates to evaluate the evidence that specific carcinogens ’cause’ certain types of cancer.
Students will be able to:
– Describe Hill’s postulates and compare and contrast them to Koch’s postulates.
– Explain the limitations of Hill’s postulates with respect to establishing causation as opposed to correlation
In the final unit students are introduced to important cancer terms that they will encounter in the media including the concepts of risk and exposure. Using population statistics to calculate risk factors, they will determine how to assess the risk of developing different kinds of cancers and will be able to evaluate the choices they themselves make. In this way they will begin to learn how to make informed decisions to minimize their own risk of developing cancer.
Students will be able to
– Explain the terms “survival rate”, “incidence rate”, and “age-adjusted mortality rate” in the context of cancer statistics.
– Explain how population statistics can be used to calculate risk factors for cancer.
– Apply risk factors to make an informed decision on behavior.
In this study, students must wrestle with the unknowns of science and medicine. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, a patient receives conflicting treatment suggestions from two different doctors. Students must evaluate the pros and cons to each treatment option to arrive at their own suggestion for the patient. In the lesson, students with no background in cancer will learn the very basics of what cancer is and how DNA repair proteins play a role in radiation treatment.
Glioblastomas are a very deadly type of brain cancer and the most common type of cancerous brain tumor in adults. Traditional therapies for cancer are surgery to remove the tumor, or using chemicals or radiation to destroy the tumor cells. These have not been very successful for glioblastomas because it is very hard to kill only the tumor cells in the brain, without damaging or destroying nearby normal cells. It is generally agreed that a goal for cancer treatment is to create drugs or treatments that can selectively target only the cancer cells, without harming the normal cells. The viral therapy described in this case study does just that. The virus is modified to enter and replicate within glioblastoma cells. Once inside, it replicates and sends a signal to the immune system. The cancer cells infected with this virus are now targets for immune destruction. This treatment is currently in phase I trials for safety. In this study, students will design and interpret experiments to evaluate the efficacy of this treatment.
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually-transmitted infection in the U.S. Infection is usually cleared by the immune system but can lead to cervical cancer, genital warts, and other cancers. A vaccine administered prior to the first sexual encounter can prevent infection; screening can detect abnormal cells so they can be treated before developing into cancer. In this study, students make predictions and compare these predictions to actual data. They then synthesize different data sets to construct an explanation for current Pap screening recommendations.
In this study, students are introduced to the various types of studies that have contributed to establishing a definitive link between smoking and lung cancer. The case focuses on design features of one type of study—a population study. Students will design a study, then discuss aspects of certain design decisions. Finally, students will have the opportunity to re-design and predict results from their study. At the end, students compare their predicted results to actual data collected over the last century.