Scientific Goals

To accomplish its mission of advancing the understanding, prevention and treatment of virus-associated cancers and other cancers, members of the Human Cancer Virology Program and their inter-programmatic collaborators share a focused set of interactive research goals:

• To elucidate the pathways by which diverse tumor viruses infect, replicate, interact with their hosts, and maintain their presence through the years to decades typically associated with tumor progression, as well as approaches to inhibit these viral functions.

• To determine the mechanisms by which tumor viruses promote the induction and maintenance of tumors, including identifying viral and host genes essential to the continuing survival of tumor cells and how to block these functions.

• To define the molecular changes and diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers defining the differences among normal tissues, virus-associated tumors, virus-free tumors at the same anatomical sites, and relevant pre-cancerous lesions.

• To use the results of all of the above studies to develop novel and improved approaches to prevent and treat tumor virus infection, replication, and tumor induction.