Deadly Stowaways: Seeds of cancer in transplant recipients are traced back to donors
By Nathan Seppa
An organ transplant gives many people a second chance at life, but the harsh drugs required for staving off immune rejection of the new tissues seem to hike a recipient’s risk of cancer. For someone desperately in need of a heart or liver, this drawback represents a gamble worth taking.
Scientists initially considered this boost in cancer risk to be the result of a suppressed immune system no longer capable of checking the proliferation of cancer precursor cells already in transplant recipients. That may be only part of the explanation. In the May Nature Medicine, researchers report that the cellular precursors for one type of cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, can be transmitted in the form of virally infected donor tissue.