Second contagious form of cancer found in Tasmanian devils | Hacker News Reader

Second contagious form of cancer found in Tasmanian devils

cam.ac.uk

20 pointsrandomname26 comments

Man, the Tasmanian devils just can't get a break.

The link notes that only two other species have been known to have transmissible cancers. Dogs and soft-shell clams. The fact that devils now have a second form of transmissible cancer makes the researchers wonder if transmissible cancers might be less rare than expected or that something in the devils DNA makes them more susceptible to cancer than other creatures.

I just did some casual research, and it turns out that there are four known types of transmissible cancers. The other known one is a contagious cancer found in Syrian hamsters that's spread by mosquito bite.

That's the most interesting one I've heard of.

A good rabbit-hole starting point on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer

> Man, the Tasmanian devils just can't get a break.

Neither can the guy in that Wikipedia article you linked to. He had HIV, then got a tapeworm, which gave him cancer.

> Only one known instance of cross-species cancer transmission is known, that of a 41-year-old man in Colombia with a compromised immune system due to HIV. The man's tumor cells were shown to have originated from the dwarf tapeworm, Hymenolepis nana, making this a case of parasite-to-host cancer transmission.

I suspect that in these animals, there gene diversity is quite low. Most humans cannot even share blood with one another, let alone cancers because our immune systems doesn't like things that are too different than our own cells. I suspect cancer from a twin could be more easily transmissible than one from a stranger.

Yep, they're not very diverse at all, which, as you've suspected, is probably what makes them more susceptible to the transmissable cancer: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/02/science/la-sci-tazma...

Note that this new cancer is also a face cancer. My understanding is that Tasmanian devils transmit the cancer by biting and scratching each other's faces, which they do a lot. The fact that there's an easy transmission route for a transmissible facial cancer makes it more likely that a new one will take hold in the population.

Url changed from http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/new-con..., which appears to be a more original source.

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