Selected abstract: ICCMg3 award lecture: Investigation of viruses in human cancers by application of multiple pre-sequencing enrichment methods

sarah-morrelup-iccmg-congress

Selected abstract: ICCMg3 award lecture: Investigation of viruses in human cancers by application of multiple pre-sequencing enrichment methods

Viruses and other infectious agents cause more than 15% of human cancer cases. However, with many cancers being of unknown origin, this percentage could be even higher. Application of high-throughput sequencing led to the discovery of Merkel cell polyomavirus suspected of causing Merkel cell carcinomas, and in later years, large scale investigations of viral sequences in high-throughput RNA-sequencing and whole genome or exome data from The Cancer Genome Atlas have been conducted. The aim of our study was to perform a targeted investigation of all the major viral groups and the multiple possible states of viral genomes, across multiple cancer types.

Our study sheds light on viral presence in human cancers and provides relevant virome data for future reference for both virus-cancer studies and virome investigations in general.