Posted Jan 25, 2009 15:05 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: Beardless Bdale by jd
Parent article: Beardless Bdale
In the general case, but given:
1) An immune system that isn't triggered
2) The ability to encourage blood vessel growth
3) Easy transmission of immortal cells
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.