Prostate Cancer

Thus, the researchers said their discovery raises the possibility that increased susceptibility to viral infection may play a role in development of some cancers.

However, they emphasized that their findings by no means implicate the virus, dubbed XMRV, in causing The virus may well have flourished as a result of the failure of the defense mechanism; and other factors such as chronic inflammation may play a more direct role in the cancer.

“This finding was a big surprise because most of these endogenous viral genomes have undergone such mutation and deletion that they are incapable of giving rise to viruses any more.” Don Ganem The discovery of the new virus was made by an interdisciplinary research team led by Robert Silverman of Cleveland Clinic and HHMI investigators Joseph DeRisi and Don Ganem, both at the University of California at San Francisco.

A paper describing the findings was published on March 31, 2006, in the journal, Public Library of Science Pathogens.

The search for the new virus began when Silverman and his colleagues provided samples of a rare familial This mutation compromised the function of the enzyme produced by RNASEL, which normally shreds viral genetic material.

Infected cells carrying the sh...

In studies of mice, researchers from Austria and Canada showed that inhibiting the protein could stop the cancerous cells from migrating to the bones.

"RANKL is a protein which tells tumor cells to come to it," said professor Josef Penninger of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

"It sits on the bones, and when tumor cells circulate in the body, then RANKL attracts them into the bones.” Once a cancer has spread beyond its original site in a process known as metastasis, it becomes much more serious and difficult to treat.

An estimated 70% of patients with progressive breast cancer and 84% of advanced The findings, reported in the journal Nature, explain the puzzle of why certain cancers spread to the bones and how interfering with the process could help to prevent the spread of the disease.

When the researchers gave mice with skin cancer a drug that blocked RANKL, the rodents had fewer tumors in their bones than animals who were not treated.

But the drug did not slow the spread of the cancer to o...