Genome editing for the treatment of tumorigenic viral infections and virus-related carcinomas

Abstract

Viral infections cause at least 10%–15% of all human carcinomas. Over the last century, the elucidation of viral oncogenic roles in many cancer types has provided fundamental knowledge on carcinogenetic mechanisms and established a basis for the early intervention of virus-related cancers. Meanwhile, rapidly evolving genome-editing techniques targeting viral DNA/RNA have emerged as novel therapeutic strategies for treating virus-related carcinogenesis and have begun showing promising results. This review discusses the recent advances of genome-editing tools for treating tumorigenic viruses and their corresponding cancers, the challenges that must be overcome before clinically applying such genome-editing technologies, and more importantly, the potential solutions to these challenges.

Keywords

genome-editing tools / tumorigenic virus / delivery method / off-target effect / virus-related carcinoma

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funds from the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, No. 2015CB553903 to Ding Ma and No. 2013CB911304 to Hui Wang), the National Science-technology Supporting Plan Projects (No. 2015BAI13B05), Chinese National Key Plan of Precision Medicine Research (No. 2016YFC0902901), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81402158, 81472783, 81230038, 81630060, 81372805, and 81761148025), Guangzhou Science and Technology Programme (No. 201605131139145); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 17ykzd15) and Three Big Constructions—Supercomputing Appication Cultivation Projects sponsored by National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Lan Yu, Xun Tian, Chun Gao, Ping Wu, Liming Wang, Bei Feng, Xiaomin Li, Hui Wang, Ding Ma, and Zheng Hu declare no conflict of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol requiring approval by a relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

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