Kaposi's Sarcoma: The Disease  (Click to go to Content)

• Attribution:  Donald Ganem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7J9dm1d3dQ (3/2010)

  • iBiology YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsvqEZBO-kNmwuDBbKbfL6A

• "In 1872, Moritz Kaposi first described a disease that included pigmented skin tumors and in some cases tumors of the viscera.

• While KS has been endemic in some areas of the world for many years, a highly aggressive and deadly form of the disease emerged concurrently with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

• "KS is a very unusual cancer including multiple cell types, including cells of a spindle morphology, in a single tumor. In this section of the talk, the atypical biology of this cancer it will be discussed.

• "Epidemiological studies suggested that HIV was not the causative agent of KS.

• "In the mid-1990s, a new human herpes virus, Kaposis sarcoma associated herpes virus (KSHV), was identified as the likely cause of KS.

  • "Development of a serological test for the presence of KSHV in patients showed that KS seroprevalence strikingly mirrored KS risk and, additionally, KS was never found in KSHV negative patients.

• "This data strongly supported KSHV as the causative agent of KS.

  • However, epidemiology also showed that additional cofactors are required for disease development and in the case of patients with AIDS, HIV is this cofactor

• Don Ganem left the University of California, San Francisco in 2011 to join the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Emeryville, CA."

Previous Video