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Lack of Association between EBV and Breast Carcinoma

Departments of ¹ Oncology, ² Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and ³ Biostatistics and Medical Informatics; ⁴ Institute for Molecular Virology; and ⁵ Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin

Requests for reprints: Bill Sugden, Department of Oncology, 814 McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, 1400 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: sugden{at}oncology.wisc.edu

Multiple conflicting findings have been presented which indicate that EBV may be found in anywhere from 0% to 51% of breast carcinomas. When EBV has been found causally associated with other human cancers, its DNA and one or more of its viral products have been detected in most tumor cells of a given biopsy. To test whether EBV has such an association with breast cancer, we measured the number of viral DNA molecules per cell in matched normal and tumor biopsies from 45 patients using real-time quantitative PCR. In no case could EBV DNA consistently be detected, with either of two different probes, at levels above 0.1 molecules per cell in two sections of the tumor samples. These levels of detection match those detected in EBV-negative cell lines and therefore likely represent noise in the assays. Equally importantly, the distribution of these low signals was the same between tumors and their matched normal controls. We conclude that EBV does not contribute to the development of breast cancers as it does to epithelial cancers such as nasopharyngeal and gastric carcinomas or to Burkitt's and Hodgkin's lymphomas.

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