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Updated: Jan 31, 2026

Studying Pancreatic Cancer Stem Cell Characteristics for Developing New Treatment Strategies
Published on: June 20, 2015
Stem cell replication, somatic mutations and role of randomness in the development of cancer
Vittorio Perduca1,2, Ludmil B Alexandrov3, Michelle Kelly-Irving4,5
1Laboratoire de Mathématiques Appliquées MAP5 (UMR CNRS 8145), Université Paris Descartes, 75006, Paris, France.
Abstract:
An intense scientific debate has recently taken place relating to the "bad luck" hypothesis in cancer development, namely that intrinsic random, and therefore unavoidable, mutagenic events would have a predominant role in tumorigenesis. In this article we review the main contributions to this debate and explain the reasons why the claim that cancer is mostly explained by intrinsic random factors is unsupported by data and theoretical models. In support of this, we present an analysis showing that smoking-induced mutations are more predictive of cancer risk than the lifetime number of stem cell cellular divisions.
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