Interesting new slant on breast cancer which shows how the fundamental
science crosses many disciplines, as well as the multifactorial nature of
the disease. I've only seen a news report in the Sydney Morning Herald, but
it was an announcement by Prof.Robert Garry of Tulane at the 11th Int.Cong.
on Virology being held in Sydney, Australia.
It has been known since 1942 that there is a virus which causes breast
cancer in mice. There was a strong suspicion that there was a similar virus
in humans. The difficulty in finding this virus was due to the fact that
the family of endogenous retroviruses to which it belongs numbers around
50,000. The association is not absolute - 85% viral presence in affected
vs. 20% in nonaffected for a moderate size sample.
There has long been a suspicion that viruses and in particular endogenous
retroviruses play a causative role in many human diseases that are not
normally primarily thought of as viral diseases. If this result is
confirmed it could very well change the research agenda because the search
for human cancer viruses had been largely abandoned in the mid 1980s after a
flurry of enthusiasm following the discovery of reverse transcriptase.
Alan J. Robinson
robin073 at tc.umn.edu
.
