Study Finds No Evidence of Cytomegalovirus in Glioblastoma and Other High-Grade Gliomas
In a rigorous study of tumor tissue collected from 125 patients with aggressive brain cancers, researchers at Johns Hopkins said they have found no evidence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and concluded that a link between the two diseases, as claimed by earlier reports, likely does not exist. A report on the research was published by Holdhoff et al in Clinical Cancer Research.
The Johns Hopkins team cautioned that studies to confirm this finding are needed to absolutely rule out any role for the common CMV in glioblastoma and other cancers that arise in glial cells. But they say their study substantially weakens the likelihood of that role.
“We have found no evidence of CMV in these tissues, and if there is no virus, targeting that virus to affect cancer using antiviral drugs or tailored vaccines doesn’t make biological sense,” said Angelo M. De Marzo, MD, PhD, Professor of Pathology, Oncology, and Urology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.
Earlier Reports
As early as 2002, the Johns Hopkins team says, several studies reported that tumor cells isolated within glioblastomas and other gliomas were infected with CMV, a herpesvirus that infects more than half of all adults by age 40.
Because other viruses are associated with some cancers—notably human papillomavirus, which causes most cervical and some head and neck cancers, and Epstein-Barr virus, which causes some lymphomas—those earlier findings generated excitement about the potential for antiviral therapies to improve the usually poor outlook for people with gliomas.
However, explained Matthias Holdhoff, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Oncology and Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, other laboratories found no evidence of the virus in these types of tumors. “Significant resources have already gone into this field of study,” he said, “making it very important to definitively answer the question of whether there’s an association between CMV and gliomas or not.”
Methodology
To investigate, Drs. Holdhoff and De Marzo, along with Ravit Arav-Boger, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and their colleagues used several techniques to test tumor and other tissues from 99 men and women and 26 children with glioblastoma and other high-grade gliomas preserved and stored in different ways. Some of the tissues were stored as fresh frozen tissue and some as formalin-fixed/paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue, using either standard pathology slides or a tissue microarray.
What they called an “exhaustive” study design was crafted to determine presence of CMV in different ways, said Dr. De Marzo.
The researchers ran these samples through different analytical techniques to look for CMV. Fresh frozen and FFPE samples underwent real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing or chromogenic in situ hybridization. The FFPE samples and those in a tissue microarray underwent immunohistochemistry, a process that looks for certain CMV-derived proteins.
Study Findings
Using one or more of these techniques on all of the samples from the 125 patients, the researchers found no evidence of CMV in any of them.
Additionally, the researchers took blood samples from 18 recently diagnosed patients before they received standard radiation to treat their cancer and periodically after their treatment. The scientists tested the blood plasma of these patients using real-time PCR and their serum using a method known as the IgG avidity index, which looks for antibodies to a virus and can indicate the presence of a latent or previous infection.
Of 15 patients for whom blood serum was available, 8 had signs of CMV in their serum, similar to rates in the general population. None had signs of the virus in their tumors, including those who tested positive for the virus in their serum, reported the researchers.
The scientists say that more research using large numbers of tumor tissues from patients throughout the world, coordinated by independent laboratories with no stake in the presence of CMV in gliomas, will be necessary before CMV can definitely be ruled out as a player in these cancers.
The content in this post has not been reviewed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Inc. (ASCO®) and does not necessarily reflect the ideas and opinions of ASCO®.
