Researchers find no evidence of cytomegalovirus in tumor tissue
WEDNESDAY, March 8, 2017 (HealthDay News) — There’s no link between cytomegalovirus (CMV) and glioblastoma or other high-grade gliomas, according to a study published recently in Clinical Cancer Research.
Matthias Holdhoff, M.D., Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, and colleagues analyzed tumor tissue from 125 patients with glioblastoma and other high-grade gliomas. Ninety-nine of the samples were from adults, and 26 were from children.
The researchers found no evidence of CMV in the tumor tissue. Further studies are needed to rule out any role for CMV in these brain cancers. But the new findings suggest little likelihood of any connection, the researchers said. Several earlier studies reported finding CMV in tumor cells from patients with aggressive glioma brain cancers. This led to speculation that therapies targeting CMV could improve outcomes for patients with gliomas.
“Significant resources have already gone into this field of study, making it very important to definitively answer the question of whether there’s an association between CMV and gliomas or not,” Holdhoff said in a Hopkins news release. He noted that other laboratories have also found no evidence of CMV in glioma tumors.
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