Pulmonary Circulation (Dec 2017)
Identity crisis in pulmonary arterial hypertension
Abstract
Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) shares many hallmarks with cancer. Cancer cells acquire their hallmarks by a pathological Darwinian evolution process built on the so-called cancer cell “identity crisis.” Here we demonstrate that PAH shares the most striking features of the cancer identity crisis: the ectopic expression of normally silent tissue-specific genes.