Lucia Umberto, Grisolia Giulia
Dipartimento Energia "Galileo Ferraris", Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 Jul 16;22(7):774. doi: 10.3390/e22070774.
From a thermodynamic point of view, living cell life is no more than a cyclic process. It starts with the newly separated daughter cells and restarts when the next generations grow as free entities. During this cycle, the cell changes its entropy. In cancer, the growth control is damaged. In this paper, we analyze the role of the volume-area ratio in the cell in relation to the heat exchange between cell and its environment in order to point out its effect on cancer growth. The result holds to a possible control of the cancer growth based on the heat exchanged by the cancer toward its environment and the membrane potential variation, with the consequence of controlling the ions fluxes and the related biochemical reactions. This second law approach could represent a starting point for a possible future support for the anticancer therapies, in order to improve their effectiveness for the untreatable cancers.
从热力学的角度来看，活细胞的生命不过是一个循环过程。它始于新分离的子细胞，并在下一代作为自由实体生长时重新开始。在这个循环过程中，细胞会改变其熵。在癌症中，生长控制受到破坏。在本文中，我们分析了细胞中体积与面积之比在细胞与其环境之间热交换方面的作用，以指出其对癌症生长的影响。结果表明，基于癌症与其环境之间交换的热量以及膜电位变化，有可能控制癌症生长，从而控制离子通量和相关的生化反应。这种基于第二定律的方法可能为未来对抗癌疗法提供支持奠定基础，以提高其对无法治疗的癌症的疗效。
