Cancer Virology Program, Hillman Cancer Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; email:
Annu Rev Virol. 2024 Sep;11(1):239-259. doi: 10.1146/annurev-virology-111821-103721.
Of the thousands of viruses infecting humans, only seven cause cancer in the general population. Tumor sequencing is now a common cancer medicine procedure, and so it seems likely that more human cancer viruses already would have been found if they exist. Here, we review cancer characteristics that can inform a dedicated search for new cancer viruses, focusing on Kaposi sarcoma herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus as the most recent examples of successful genomic and transcriptomic searches. We emphasize the importance of epidemiology in determining which cancers to examine and describe approaches to virus discovery. Barriers to virus discovery, such as novel genomes and viral suppression of messenger RNA expression, may exist that prevent virus discovery using existing approaches. Optimally virus hunting should be performed in such a way that if no virus is found, the tumor can be reasonably excluded from having an infectious etiology and new information about the biology of the tumor can be found.
在感染人类的数千种病毒中，只有七种会导致普通人群患癌症。肿瘤测序现在是一种常见的癌症治疗方法，因此，如果存在更多的人类癌症病毒，它们很可能已经被发现了。在这里，我们回顾了癌症的特征，这些特征可以为专门寻找新的癌症病毒提供信息，重点关注卡波西肉瘤疱疹病毒和 Merkel 细胞多瘤病毒，它们是最近成功进行基因组和转录组搜索的例子。我们强调了流行病学在确定要检查的癌症方面的重要性，并描述了病毒发现的方法。病毒发现的障碍，如新颖的基因组和病毒对信使 RNA 表达的抑制，可能存在，这可能会阻止使用现有方法发现病毒。理想情况下，病毒搜索应该以这样的方式进行，即如果没有发现病毒，则可以合理地排除肿瘤具有传染性病因，并可以找到有关肿瘤生物学的新信息。
