The Contagious Taste of Cancer(historytoday.com) |
The Contagious Taste of Cancer(historytoday.com) |
My laymans take: Cancer is a disease of the DNA of a cell. Viruses survive by altering cellular DNA. It begs the question: How many other viruses cause cancer?
It also seems clear to me that the virus may not be the sole cause since not everybody gets cancer so it is a multi-variable problem.
Virus + X = cancer
This will be harder to nail down but with modern data tools we should be able to get there.
Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?
Why brag that you are uninformed?
Some of the more successful interventions for cancer are preventative (for example removing polyps during colonoscopies) and genetic counseling is common.
Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?
There are billions of dollars spent on this problem through huge DNA/RNA/Epigenomics/Chromatin Accessibility sequencing initiatives. There is also a huge amount of model system work such as mouse models.
The challenge though is mutations can happen in a plethora of ways and their effect is highly dependent on which gene is mutated. There is also the tissue context, e.g. inflammation, spatial structure, etc., that can setup a background for increased mutation. That is why targeted therapies are often the most effective, because they target the general causative feature of a given tumour subtype, the problem is not every protein can be targeted now and each tumour, even within the same subtype has their own unique mutational profile due to the stochasticity of the way mutations occur over repeated rounds of cell division.
And back to viruses, yes they cause cancer because they can mutate DNA. But it's pretty clear, most of the viral "enriched" cancer types are generally in places where transmission is commonplace, e.g. reproductive organs or head/neck.
Hmm, a disturbing and dangerous thought. But what does that mean for my comment? Who is paying me? What do they want? Will the lizard men of Hippocrates command the subtle ghasts of Papilla to inflict deep and lasting injury to our very souls?
Troubling. We must investigate.
And yes I know that outcomes after detection have improved, but the HPV vaccine shows an alternative that to me deserves more resources.
I am simply frustrated by 60 years of research and lots of dead friends and family. If that's a crime get the tar and feathers while I strip down to my shorts.
Consider yogurt. Some ancient person decided to sample curdled milk in the intestine of a dead sheep, and subsequently figured out how to replicate that experience.
I am a bit surprised that his own immune cells wouldn't stop it, but if cancer were easy for the immune system to deal with nobody would die of it.
This made me think, whether it would somehow make sense that cancer cells on another host would be detected by the immune system of that host. Theoretically, these immune cells have different “initialization parameters” so to say and maybe they could show affinity to the foreign cancer cells.
But then again I am not an expert and this is just a pure speculation.
Tasmanian devils apparently have little genetic diversity so they are more subject to this problem.
https://surgery.international/surgeon-diagnosed-with-patient...
The case is fairly old, from 1996. It re-surfaced recently.
Doctors of that era, especially those who weren't too keen on hygiene, probably did not have exceptionally great life-spans.
Same for herpes virus. It causes ulcerations, but too common and small to be confused with cancer.