[RD (OP)]

A laboratory claims they can generate one trillion human cancer cells, from a starting point of 100 cells, in less than 48 hours. Is this now possible ?. 

cf. HeLa cancer cell-population doubles every ~24 hours , so would take over 3 weeks to culture a trillion of those from 100.

NB: The lab says no genetic-modification involved to speed up the process.


[ And while we are on the subject, how big is a trillion cells. I guess somewhere between 100g-1000g ]

[chiralSPO]

That sounds suspicious to me. Even if we grant a rate of doubling every 6 hours, 48 hours (8 splits) would only increase by a factor of 2⁸ or 256, giving 25,600 cells from 48 hours of incubation starting with 100 cells. This is a far cry from 1,000,000,000,000! To achieve this massive number of cells from 100, they would have to double almost every 90 minutes. Do you have a link to the source of this claim?

[chris]

It sounds very iffy to me.

A newborn baby contains about 50 trillion cells and takes 10 months to make! I appreciate that lots of cells are made and then destroyed during the process, and there's more to a baby and the cells grow at different rates, but if cells could grow that fast then women would have evolved to push out far more babies far faster than they do...

[evan_au]

In the right conditions, E.Coli can divide about every 20 minutes.
In 48 hours, that would give you 144 doublings, or 2x10⁴⁵ cells from 100 starters.

Yeast cells can divide in 8 hours.
Probably the fastest division of human cells is in the zygote.

But human DNA is bigger than E.Coli (3 billion vs 5 million base pairs).
- And human DNA has a lot of error-checking in its replication.
- Maybe they have turned off the error-checking, so replication can occur faster than normal (but suffer more errors than normal)?

This would certainly speed up development of monoclonal antibodies!

[RD (OP)]

... Do you have a link to the source of this claim?

... RGCC lab has the international, world patent, on the cell culture which allows the growth (expansion) of the 5-200 CTC’s/CSC’s found in your blood sample to 100’s of billions up to trillions in just 24-36 hours ...

http://www.webcitation.org/6lj7fzK0U

[CTC = Circulating Tumour Cells]. The lab only gets 50ml of blood from the customer, so by their own admission, will only get about a hundred CTCs, assuming they can extract them all, and keep them viable.   So they're claiming from a starting point of ~100 cells, they can produce a trillion in "24-36 hours".  That seems totally unbelievable.

(Although "atmctx" is an American website, the miraculous cell-growth takes place in Europe).

- Maybe they have turned off the error-checking, so replication can occur faster than normal (but suffer more errors than normal)?

They say they haven't modified the genes  ....

... after the final expansion we have maintained the identical genotype ...

http://www.webcitation.org/6lj7fzK0U