In a surprising discovery, researchers say they have found a virus in some prostate cancer patients, a finding that opens new research avenues in the most common major cancer among men in the United States.
The virus, closely related to one previously found only in mice, was found in cancerous prostates removed from men with a certain genetic defect. The researchers, with the University of California, San Francisco and the Cleveland Clinic, warn that they have not discovered any links between the virus and prostate cancer, but they were nonetheless excited about prospects for future research.
Shouldn’t really be too surprising by now. Entire texts have been written on infectious causes of cancer; this is just one more potential virus to throw into the pot. (And it should be strongly emphasized right now that even the link between the virus and prostate cancer hasn’t been well-established yet, much less a causation. What they have now is an intriguing finding that needs more follow-up).
These findings are again for a symposium presentation, which is always frustrating to me when it’s reported in the news because, even if it’s been published in the literature (and generally it hasn’t yet), they never mention the journal. But the story does mention a bit about their methods:
“This is a class of virus no one would have looked for in prostate cancer,” said UCSF researcher Joe DeRisi, who developed the so-called “gene chip” that made the discovery. DeRisi’s chip contains 20,000 snippets of vital genetic material from every known virus. It is the same chip that confirmed a previously undiscovered virus in the cold family that caused the SARS outbreak three years ago.
There’s some background on the gene chip in this story from 2003 about the identification of SARS, and a PLoS Biology paper on the technique here. It’s a technique with a lot of promise for identifying other previously-unrecognized pathogens as well. I’m still hoping for a breast cancer virus. These have been found in other animals (for example, mice) and have been examined in humans, but nothing solid has come out of that yet. As far as I know, that’s not been tested using the new gene chips, however.