Contagious Cancer Found in Dogs

Dan East writes "Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker's sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumor cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumor cells from 40 dogs with Sticker's sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumor cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils."

Comments

It happens in humans, too.

[Skynet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV#Cancer

Make sure to use protection, Slashdotters!

oh wait....

Re:It happens in humans, too.

[thebdj]

There is a big difference. In the HPV case, there is a viral infection THAT MAY cause cancer in people with the virus. This is talking about the tumor cells actually transferring from one animal to another to cause infection. So to recap, HPV is a virus that may cause cancer in women with it and should not be confused with communicable cancer. A communicable cancer would be transferred from person one to person two and cause a cancer infection. (You know, how the flu, common cold, and a host of other diseases work.)

Re:It happens in humans, too.

[eli pabst]

I haven't read the journal article in Cell yet, but from my understanding this isn't interesting from the standpoint of a virus being able to transform normal cells into a tumor. There are a large number of examples of that (EBV, KSHV, hepatitis B virus). This is interesting because it's the actual tumor cells themselves that are being transmitted from one host to another. You can do that in the lab by injecting tumor cells from one mouse into another and letting a new tumor form, however I haven't seen examples of this occuring naturally and in those experiments the mice need to either be from the same genetic background or immunosuppressed SCID mice.

tasmanian devil & spreading cancer

[fredouil]

unfortunately this kind of cancer is not new, here in Australia, the Tasmanian devil are diying and will soon disapear. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/02 27_060227_tasmanian.html

Not Taz!!

[Rob T Firefly]

A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils.

Symptoms include dizziness, slurred speech, and violence toward woodland creatures... especially rabbits.

Re:How are these Cancer Cells?

[ComaVN]

Regular pathogens did not originate as animal cells

It's not even really LIKE a normal cancer...

[ScentCone]

... in the sense that these are not the dogs' own cells. This is much more like the dog being a petri dish for a parasitic cell that's being physically passed along, almost like bacteria. The cells just set up shop in the new dog's tissues.

Slightly annoying, in TFA, is the notion that "DNA will try anything to reproduce itself." That might want to read more like "just about everything happens to DNA as it's cloned, and sometimes the mutations work better, and sometimes they fail." There's nothing worse than anthropomorphizing your description of cellular mechanics.

Re:How are these Cancer Cells?

[NearlyHeadless]

It's closest, really, to a parasite, but it's still weirder than that, since it's genetically the same species as its host.

It's genetically almost identical, but I think we can say this is a new species. It's thus a single-cell species of dog.