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Virology and cancer biology: the retroviruses and the discovery of oncogenes

Part 1 of 2
Published on November 30, 2020   60 min

A selection of talks on Oncology

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0:00
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.
0:50
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).
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Virology and cancer biology: the retroviruses and the discovery of oncogenes

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