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“Immortal” cells can keep dividing in laboratory culture or within some tumors; they do not make a person immortal. The same broad capacity to renew cells helps maintain and repair tissues, but it must be tightly controlled. When growth-control safeguards fail, continued division can contribute to cancer.
What does it mean for a cell to be “immortal”?
In this context, “immortal” describes a cell population that can continue dividing under particular conditions, especially in a laboratory cell line. It does not mean that a person lives forever, that every cell in the body divides indefinitely, or that a cell is immune to damage and death.
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HeLa is a well-known example. The line was derived from Henrietta Lacks’s cervical cancer cells. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) explains that “Some of her cancer cells began being used in research due to their unique ability to continuously grow and divide in the laboratory.” That property made HeLa a consequential research tool, but it is a property of cells grown in culture—not human immortality.
NIH’s Office of Science Policy reported in 2022 that more than 110,000 publications citing HeLa-cell use appeared between 1953 and 2018. This is a publication-citation count for that interval, not a count of experiments, cures, or clinical outcomes.
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How does cell renewal help repair tissue?
Many tissues depend on cells being replaced as they are lost or damaged. Tissue stem cells can contribute to this renewal by producing cells that replenish a tissue while maintaining a stem-cell population through self-renewal. This capacity supports maintenance and repair, but it is not unlimited or unregulated.
Growth-control pathways, including tumor-suppressor mechanisms, can stop damaged or abnormally proliferating cells from continuing to divide. Those safeguards help protect against cancer. They can also constrain the long-term proliferative reserve of stem-cell compartments. In that sense, tissue repair and cancer prevention can pull in different directions: renewal is useful, while uncontrolled renewal is dangerous.
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Why can continued cell division contribute to cancer?
In many normal somatic cells, telomeres—structures at chromosome ends—shorten as cells divide. Telomerase is an enzyme that can maintain telomeres and thereby support continued proliferation in certain cell types. Many cancers use telomerase; a review reports that most human tumors express it. That is a review-level estimate, not a count from a new analysis.
Telomerase is not a one-step explanation for cancer. A tumor develops through multiple changes, including disruptions to the safeguards that normally limit abnormal growth. Telomere maintenance can help a cancer cell population keep dividing, but telomerase by itself is not established as sufficient to cause cancer. Researchers have also found telomerase-directed treatment challenging; its presence in many tumors does not make it a simple or proven treatment target.
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Is cellular senescence always helpful or harmful?
Cellular senescence is commonly described as a durable arrest of the cell cycle: a senescent cell is no longer dividing in the usual way, but that does not mean it is simply a dead cell. Senescence is associated with wound healing, tissue remodeling, aging, immune interactions, and cancer.
Its effects depend on context. A response that helps limit abnormal proliferation or contributes to repair can also affect surrounding tissue through remodeling and cell-to-cell interactions. For that reason, it is inaccurate to treat every senescent cell as beneficial, every one as harmful, or senescence as a single, unchanging state.
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Can boosting telomerase or cell division improve repair?
Research on telomerase and regeneration raises possible biological questions; it does not establish that people can safely boost telomerase or cell division to repair tissue. Increasing a cell’s capacity to proliferate would have to be considered alongside the risk of abnormal growth and the safeguards that prevent cancer. A 2025 review discusses both regenerative possibilities and cancer risks, but that is not clinical proof of a safe regenerative therapy.
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How to interpret claims about “immortal” cells
- Check the setting: a laboratory cell line, a normal tissue stem cell, and a cancer cell are not interchangeable.
- Ask what “immortal” means: continued division in culture or a tumor is not organism-level immortality.
- Look beyond telomerase: telomere maintenance is one part of cell biology, while cancer involves multiple changes and disrupted growth controls.
- Separate outcomes: tissue repair, age-related decline, and tumor growth are distinct questions, even when they involve related cell processes.
- Check the evidence type: mechanistic findings and reviews do not by themselves establish that a therapy is safe or effective in people.
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