BK polyomavirus (BKV) nephropathy is a major concern in renal transplantation. Its main consequence is graft loss, which occurs in more than 50% of the cases. De novo renal cell carcinoma in renal allograft is a very rare event. Most of these tumors are papillary or clear cell carcinomas. We report herein the first case of collecting duct carcinoma of the renal allograft in a kidney-pancreas al...

Background. BK virus (BKV) infection is a common complication following kidney transplantation. Immunosuppression reduction is the cornerstone of treatment while adjuvant drugs have been tried in small uncontrolled studies. We sought to examine our center's experience with the use of ciprofloxacin in patients with persistent BKV infection. Methods. Retrospective evaluation of the effect of a 30...

Genomic sequences of the human polyomaviruses, JC virus (JCV) and BK virus (BKV), and simian virus 40 (SV40) have been reported from several types of human brain tumors, but there have been no population-based seroepidemiologic studies to evaluate the association between polyomavirus infection and brain tumors. We conducted a case-control study, nested within a prospective cohort, to investigat...

BK virus (BKV) is widely accepted to be the causative agent of polyomavirus nephropathy. In immunocompromised individuals, especially kidney transplant recipients, BKV can replicate in kidney epithelial cells, causing loss of renal function and eventual destruction of the graft. Advances in immunosuppressive therapies may be partially responsible for the increasing incidence of polyomavirus nep...

In 1971, two human polyoma viruses, BK and JC, were isolated and named after the patients in whom they were first identified [1]. BK virus (BKV) was isolated from the urine of a kidney transplant patient and JC virus (JCV) from the brain of a patient with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and progressive multifocal leukencephalopathy. Primary infection with these DNA viruses occurs early in childhood and 70–8...

Polyomavirus BK (BKV) causes polyomavirus-associated nephropathy (PyVAN) and hemorrhagic cystitis (PyVHC) in renal and bone marrow transplant patients, respectively. Antiviral drugs with targeted activity against BKV are lacking. Since the antimalarial drug artesunate was recently demonstrated to have antiviral activity, the possible effects of artesunate on BKV replication in human primary ren...

Two plaque morphology BK virus (BKV) mutants (pm526 and pm527) rescued from a hamster pineocytoma cell line Pc13 were characterized and compared with a similarly rescued and previously characterized mutant (pm522), its derivatives (tr530, tr531, and tr532), and the wild type (501) for their biological activities and for the structures of their transcriptional control regions. The two mutants gr...

OBJECTIVE Bkv-miR-B1-5p, one of the microRNAs encoded by BK virus, was recently reported to be elevated in the blood among the patients with BK virus nephropathy (BKVN). Urinary exosome was suggested to be a possible source of biomarker for kidney diseases, but it was unknown whether it could contain viral microRNA as well as human microRNAs. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether urinar...

BK virus (BKV) infection after kidney transplantation can cause BKV nephropathy (BKVAN) resulting in graft dysfunction and allograft loss. The treatment for BKVAN is reduction of the immunosuppressive load which increases risk transplant rejection. There no biomarker to monitor activity besides viral load. value Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Spot (ELISPOT) assay as a tool recipient's anti-BKV imm...

Monitoring of active polyomavirus BK (BKV) infections by quantitative real-time PCR is becoming a progressively more routine practice in the care of renal transplant patients due to the potential for these infections to injure transplanted kidneys. Quantitative BKV results from a previously validated, laboratory-developed real-time PCR assay based on commercially available MGB Alert reagents we...