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Hello, my name is Lynn Enquist.
I'm a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University,
and today I'm going to talk to you about virology and cancer biology.
0:12
I've got a cartoon on the first slide here that basically shows
how a normal epithelial cell layer begins to change,
is transformed into these rapidly-growing cells,
and they move in to form what we would call a tumor or cancer.
Viral infections are a contributing factor in more than 20 percent of all human cancers.
In fact, viral infections are the major cause of liver and cervical cancer.
So today, I will discuss how fundamental virology paved
the way for many insights that form the basis of modern cancer biology.
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There are seven well-recognized viruses associated with human tumors,
I've listed them here.
The human papillomaviruses are involved in causing cervical carcinoma.
There's Merkel cell polyomavirus which causes
a type of cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma.
There are herpes viruses, like Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)
that causes B-cell lymphomas.
There's Kaposi's sarcoma-associated virus (KSHV)
that causes Kaposi's sarcoma, that
really came to our attention during the AIDS/HIV pandemic.
There's human T-cell lymphotropic virus 1
(HTLV1), which causes a very rare adult T-cell leukemia,
and then there are the viruses that cause hepatocellular carcinoma,
hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV).
