Beyond The Coat

Have you ever had one of those “aha” or “whoa” moments? I had one in medical school, long before I had decided upon a career in oncology. Some of the details are fuzzy but I do remember I was sitting in in the balcony section of our lecture hall at Georgetown (read: I was being kind of lackadaisical and avoiding any and all eye contact with my Professor – sorry about that) and he was teaching us about the Epstein Barr virus or EBV. Most people have had some experience with this crazy little virus in some form or another. Most likely you have heard or known someone diagnosed with “mono” which is also known as infectious mononucleosis or the kissing disease; yep, that disease is caused by EBV. Anyway, back to the lecture hall at Georgetown – I was sitting quietly passively absorbing details about the virus and then the professor explained that EBV infection has a wide clinical presentation – some people have no symptoms and never know they were infected, some develop symptoms of “mono”, and then some people go on to develop EBV associated malignancy (cancer). I can clearly remember snapping my head up to attention and thinking…wait…what? EBV causes cancer?? It sounds kind of silly to me now to say this, but I had absolutely no clue this could happen. At the time even as a medical student, my knowledge of cancer development (fancy word for this is carcinogenesis) was limited. Basically all I knew was that somehow smoking caused cancer. Now, my professor was telling me that EBV can SOMETIMES cause cancer. {Mentally envision my 23 year old mind imploding}

It was probably 2004 when this occurred and little did I know that in 2000, a very important paper was published in the journal “Cell” describing the ‘Hallmarks of Cancer’ by Hanahan and Weinberg. The original paper described 6 hallmarks and has since been updated to include 10. These 10 hallmarks are underlying biological principles that are present in just about all of the different types of cancers (pediatric and adult included). These are the underlying reasons of how cancers develop and in those hallmarks is the answer to why EBV can sometimes cause cancer. I’ll try my very best to go through these hallmarks in the upcoming days (not all in a row, my head may implode again) and then hopefully you can get an understanding of what scientists are trying to learn about cancer every day and how to target it.

#morethanfour #ChildhoodCancer365

Access the most recent version of the paper here: Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation