[Knudson's "two-hit" hypothesis in familial cancer syndromes]

Cancer is a heritable disorder of somatic cells. Environment and hereditary both operate in the origin of human cancer. Hereditary cancer is rare, but it has served as a useful model in the understanding of carcinogenesis. A number of cancer genes have been identified by the study of hereditary cancers and implicated in sporadic forms of the same tumors. In this article, I reviewed Knudson's famous "two-hit" hypothesis of tumor suppression.