Tumour Viruses

Tumour viruses and innate immunity.

Host cells sense viral infection through pattern recognition receptors (PRRs), which detect pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and stimulate an innate immune response. PRRs are localized to several different cellular compartments and are stimulated by viral proteins and nucleic acids. PRR activation initiates signal transduction events that ultimately result in an inflammatory respo...

Effects of tumour viruses on cell growth.

Cells in higher organisms, from hydra to human beings, are subject to marvellously precise control of growth, and the loss of this control may lead to cancer. Cultured cells in vitro are also subject to control of growth in a rather crude form, which may nevertheless bear some relation to thesystems operating in vivo in whole organisms. Since tumour viruses modify these growth controls in cultu...

RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of RNA tumour viruses.

Alternative splicing in human tumour viruses: a therapeutic target?

Persistent infection with cancer risk-related viruses leads to molecular, cellular and immune response changes in host organisms that in some cases direct cellular transformation. Alternative splicing is a conserved cellular process that increases the coding complexity of genomes at the pre-mRNA processing stage. Human and other animal tumour viruses use alternative splicing as a process to max...

Oncolytic viruses & their specific targeting to tumour cells

Cancer is one of the major causes of death worldwide. In spite of achieving significant successes in medical sciences in the past few decades, the number of deaths due to cancer remains unchecked. The conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy have limited therapeutic index and a plethora of treatment related side effects. This situation has provided an impetus for search of novel therapeutic s...