English

Noun

cancerousness ‎(uncountable)

1. The state or quality of being cancerous.
   • 1854, Charles Handfield Jones, A Manual of pathological anatomy:

     If, on the other hand, a tumor consist chiefly of fibre or fibrillating blastema, the presumption of its cancerousness diminishes; we have, however, seen a growth in the liver, which had all the aspect of a scirrhous formation, and probably was so, which yet consisted solely of fibre-forming solid blastema.

   • 1983 June 9, New Scientist, volume 98, number 1361, page 691:

     Only one line of mouse cells will perform this trick— a line called NIH 3T3 that has been bred in the laboratory for so many generations that it has long since forgotten what normality is, and is within a whisker of cancerousness even without the intervention of extraneous oncogenes.

   • 2009, Catherine Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres:

     Starting in 1999, he began to mutate particular genes in human cells in culture and then to “interrogate” them for their cancerousness.