Kaposi's sarcoma historical perspective
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Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [1]
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Overview
Historical Perspective
Kaposi's sarcoma was originally described by Moritz Kaposi, an Austro-Hungarian dermatologist practicing at the University of Vienna in 1872.[1] It became more widely known as one of the AIDS defining illnesses in the 1980s.
Research over the next century suggested that KS, like some other forms of cancer, might be caused by a virus or genetic factors, but no definite cause was found. With the rise of the AIDS epidemic, KS, as initially one of the most common AIDS symptoms, was researched more intensively in hopes that it might reveal the cause of AIDS.
In 1994, Yuan Chang, Patrick S. Moore, and Ethel Cesarman at Columbia University in New York isolated genetic pieces of a virus from a KS lesion. They used representational difference analysis (a method to subtract out all of the human DNA from a sample) to isolate the viral genes. They then used these small DNA fragments as starting points to sequence the rest of the viral genome in 1996. This, the eighth human herpesvirus (HHV-8)—now known as Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV)—has since been found in all KS lesions tested, and is considered the cause of the disease. KSHV is a unique human tumor virus that has incorporated cellular genes that cause tumors into its genome ("molecular piracy"); the stolen cellular genes may help the virus escape from the immune system, but in doing so it also causes cells to proliferate. It is related to Epstein-Barr virus, a very common herpesvirus that can also cause human cancers.
References
- ↑ Kaposi, M (1872). "Idiopathisches multiples Pigmentsarkom der Haut". Arch. Dermatol. Syph. 4: 265–273.