Relationship between Epstein-Barr virus and cancer development

Abstract

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is an infectious agent with tropism for lymphoid cells and occasionally for epithelial cells. Twenty years ago it was classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as type I carcinogen, because during latent infection it expresses different proteins or micro-RNAs with oncogenic ability, so that infected cells could potentially develop cancer. This association has been shown in some cancers such as lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma and gastric cancer, while the association has not been completely clear in breast and lung cancer. This review describes, deepens and analyzes the relationship between EVB and the aforementioned types of cancer, as well as diagnostic methods for its detection. Finally, this paper poses different questions whose answers could contribute to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the EVB-cancer relationship.

Keywords

• Cancer
• Epstein-Barr
• Herpes
• Virus