Epstein-Barr virus, a herpes virus that infects many people, jump starts a form of nose and throat cancer, a new study shows. The cancer, called nasopharyngeal carcinoma, is rare among whites in the United States and Europe, but is one of the most common tumors in southern China and Southeast Asia.
"This work shows that the Epstein-Barr virus is not just a passenger in tumor cells," said Nancy Raab-Traub, one of the research report authors. "It is coming in and actually causing early changes in the cell that result in the cancer." Raab-Traub is professor of microbiology and director of the virology program at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In the study, the scientists discovered that 1,811 of the 5,326 nose and throat tissue samples examined contained nasopharyngeal tumors. The researchers also discovered that all the early tumors were the offspring of a single Epstein-Barr infected cell within each patient and did not result from multiple cells beginning to grow abnormally at about the same time.
"That implies that the event which results in some people getting this cancer while most do not is that the virus enters cells and produces viral proteins that cause a transforming infection," Raab-Traub said.
"This is actually encouraging news because cancers caused by viruses can eventually be treated with specific antiviral medications more easily than cancers caused by multiple genetic mutations," she said.
Other authors are Rajadurai Pathmanathan and Umapati Prasad of the University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, graduate student Robert Sadler and technician Kathryn Flynn, both of Carolina.
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