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Beardless BdaleBeardless BdalePosted Jan 24, 2009 2:13 UTC (Sat) by jd (guest, #26381)In reply to: Beardless Bdale by nix Parent article: Beardless Bdale
The cancer is indeed a cancer, but cancers aren't in themselves contagious, so it's clear that the cancer is induced by a pathogen that can be transmitted. This is not that unusual. The bacteria that cause stomach ulcers are linked to inducing stomach cancer, and so on. In the case of Taz, there is a virus which is the transmissible agent. This then causes the cancer in the Devils with the virus. This is why the researchers were so interested in the immune response that some Devils gave to the virus. If the immune response was strong enough, then breeding programs might have been a possibility and vaccinations could have become a consideration. It turns out that the immune response isn't nearly strong enough.
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Contagious cancers Posted Jan 24, 2009 2:42 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Getting way off topic, but what the heck...The way the guy explained it at the event, the cancers themselves are contagious. In particular, the tumor cells are not the victim's cells; they come from outside. The lack of genetic diversity in the devil population makes that sort of propagation possible. It's weird (and nasty) stuff.
Contagious cancers Posted Jan 24, 2009 13:29 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
This is not unique. There is a contagious cancer of dogs that's still
going: because it's non-lethal it's kept going more successfully, and is still hopping from dog to dog perhaps a thousand years after its progenitor died.
Yes, mammalian cell, you too can be an immortal unicellular organism.
Beardless Bdale Posted Jan 25, 2009 15:05 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
In the general case, but given:
1) An immune system that isn't triggered
then cancer itself is transmissable. Human cancers have (to the best of our knowledge) failed to achieve these three, so we haven't seen anything similar so far. Tasmanian Devils live in a small and physically constrained ecosystem and so are fairly inbred, which limits their genetic diversity and thus ability to have immune responses to cells derived from near-identical organisms.
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