Cancer biology and implications for practice.

The media seem to announce a new scientific discovery related to cancer daily. Oncology nurses are challenged to keep up with the explosion of new knowledge and to understand how it ultimately relates to the care of patients with cancer. A framework for classifying new knowledge can be useful as nurses seek to understand the biology of cancer and its related implications for practice. To understand the molecular roots of cancer, healthcare practitioners specializing in cancer care require insight into genes, their messages, and the proteins produced from those messages, as well as the new tools of molecular biology.