NBC NEWS – Doctors at the National Institutes of Health have discovered a new cause of skin cancer, according to a case report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The culprit is a type of human papillomavirus (HPV) that’s regularly found on the skin. It’s long been thought to play a role in the development of skin cancer, but wasn’t believed to be a direct cause.
Skin cancer is caused by DNA damage in skin cells. The most common source of that damage is ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
HPV can help UV-damaged DNA build up in cells and turn cancerous. However, in the new case report, doctors found that the virus itself could cause cancerous lesions to form.
The discovery was made in a 34-year-old woman with a weakened immune system; experts said it’s highly unlikely that HPV could play the same role in causing skin cancer in a person with a healthy immune system.
“The virus replicated in a somewhat uncontrolled manner and ended up integrating into the skin cells and once they did that, they became cancerous,” said Dr. Andrea Lisco at the NIH. Lisco was the woman’s doctor and also the senior author of the case report.
The woman had 43 spots of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma on her face, hands and legs. She had surgery to remove the cancers and immunotherapy, but the cancer returned.
When Lisco and his team biopsied several of her new tumors, they found that the woman’s skin cancer was being driven by something they hadn’t seen before: a group of HPVs called beta HPV.
About 90% of people carry a strain of beta HPV. Usually, the virus lives on the skin and doesn’t integrate into the DNA of skin cells.
“We shake hands and we pick up those viruses” …
