A second form of genetically distinct transmissible cancer in Tasmanian Devil was discovered by a team led by researchers from the University of Tasmania, Australia, and the University of Cambridge, UK.
According to the press release of University of Cambridge in EurekAlert!, only two other forms of transmissible cancer have been observed in nature. Transmissible cancer occurs when cancer cells gain the ability to spread beyond the body of the host that first spawned them. Usually, cancer don not survive beyond the body of the host that developed them.
"Until now, we've always thought that transmissible cancers arise extremely rarely in nature," says Dr Elizabeth Murchison from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the study, "but this new discovery makes us question this belief.
UPI reported that the first transmissible cancer in Tasmanian Devil was spread by biting and has a 100 percent kill rate in the animal that it infects. The contagious cancer almost decimated the population of Tasmanian Devils in 1996.
"Previously, we thought that Tasmanian devils were extremely unlucky to have fallen victim to a single runaway cancer that emerged from one individual devil and spread through the devil population by biting," said Murchison, "However, now that we have discovered that this has happened a second time, it makes us wonder if Tasmanian devils might be particularly vulnerable to developing this type of disease, or that transmissible cancers may not be as rare in nature as we previously thought."
The discovery of the second transmissible cancer began in 2014, when a devil with facial tumours was found in south-east Tasmania. The tumours caused by the second form of transmissible cancer were outwardly similar to the first-described transmissible cancer in Tasmanian Devils, but according to the researchers, the second cancer carries a different chromosomal arrangement and was genetically distinct. At present, there are eight Tasmanian Devils that has the new form of transmissible cancer.
The study was published and is available for public viewing in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
