A virus may be responsible for some prostate cancers and hold clues to the cause of the deadly disease, according to a new study. Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) has been previously linked to leukemia and sarcomas in animals, but researchers say this has more recently been identified in human prostate cancer samples. ‘We found that XMRV was present in 27% of prostate cancers we examined and that it was associated with more aggressive tumors,’ researcher Ila R. Singh, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah, says in a news release. If further studies confirm that the virus causes prostate cancer, researchers say it would open new avenues for diagnostic tests, vaccines, and therapies for treating prostate cancer. Prostate cancer affects one in six American men and is the most common type of cancer among men after skin cancer. Clues to Prostate Cancer’s Cause Previous studies have shown that a small group of men with a certain genetic variation were more susceptible to infection with XMRV, and the virus was present in about 10% of prostate cancer samples. In this study, published in the Proceedings of the National […]