royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb

Samuel Alizon (1) , Ignacio Bravo (1) , Paul Farrell (2) , Sally Roberts (3)

1 MIVEGEC - Maladies infectieuses et vecteurs : écologie, génétique, évolution et contrôle
2 Section of Virology. Imperial College
3 Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham

One out of ten cancers is estimated to arise from infections by a handful of oncogenic viruses. These infectious cancers constitute an opportunity for primary prevention through immunisation against the viral infection, for early detection through molecular detection of the infectious agent, and potentially for specific treatments, by targeting the virus as a marker of cancer cells. Accomplishing these objectives will require a detailed understanding of the natural history of infections, the mechanisms by which the viruses contribute to disease, the mutual adaptation of viruses and hosts, and the possible viral evolution in the absence and in the presence of the public health interventions conceived to target them. This issue showcases the current developments in experimental tissue-like and animal systems, mathematical models and evolutionary approaches to understand DNA oncoviruses. Our global aim is to provide proximate explanations to the present-day interface and interactions between viruses and hosts, as well as ultimate explanations about the adaptive value of these interactions and about the evolutionary pathways that have led to the current malignant phenotype of oncoviral infections.

Mots clés: cancer; virus; raft cultures; ecology; epidemiology; kinetics; evolution; modelling

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Samuel Alizon, Ignacio Bravo, Paul Farrell, Sally Roberts. royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2019, 374 (1773), pp.20190041. ⟨10.1098/rstb.2019.0041⟩. ⟨hal-02108649v1⟩