The two-hit theory hits 50

Abstract

Few ideas in cancer genetics have been as influential as the "two-hit" theory of tumor suppressors. This idea was introduced in 1971 by Al Knudson in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and forms the basis for our current understanding of the role of mutations in cancer. In this theoretical discussion proposing a genetic basis for retinoblastoma, a childhood cancer of the retina, Knudson posited that these tumors arise from two inactivating mutations, targeting both alleles of a putative tumor suppressor gene. While this work built on earlier proposals that cancers are the result of mutations in more than one gene, it was the first to propose a plausible mechanism by which single genes that are affected by germ-line mutations in heritable cancers could also cause spontaneous, nonheritable tumors when mutated in somatic tissues. Remarkably, Knudson described the existence and properties of a retinoblastoma tumor suppressor gene a full 15 years before the gene was cloned.

FIGURE 1:

The plot from which Knudson proposed the two-hit hypothesis (Knudson, 1971, with the permission of the National Academy of Sciences, USA).