Viruses that cause cancer offer a particularly exciting opportunity to investigate how cancer is caused and how the cancer cell functions.
Viruses are really nothing more than a small collection of genes.
The way in which these few genes function and their involvement with the cancer can be analysed more easily than genes inside a cell. Professor Gao and his colleagues have studied the Kaposi sarcoma cancer cells from AIDS patients and discovered that these cells nearly always have a protein called LNA which is not found in normal cells. Their results have demonstrated that the virus is responsible for the LNA protein. Working in collaboration with researchers at the University of Liverpool, they identified the gene on the virus that codes for the LNA protein. Since the LNA protein is so closely associated with the cancerous cells, Professor Gao and his colleagues are working on the theory that this protein plays a crucial role in causing the cells to become cancerous.