Cancer-causing cells can be transferred from one person to another in donated organs, an international team of scientists have found.

The controversial conclusion is made by Dr Patrizia Barozzi, of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy and colleagues, in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

The team studied the development of the skin cancer Kaposi sarcoma (KS), in six females who received organs from male donors.

“Nobody has shown before that the tumour cell infected with the virus may be transmitted with the organ,” said co-author Dr Mario Luppi, from the University of Brescia, Italy.

People who receive solid organ transplants are known to have an increased rate of developing cancers, with KS being one of the most frequent of these transplant-related cancers. KS mainly affects people who have had kidney grafts. The disease strikes one in 200 transplant patients in the U.S., a rate that is 400-500 times higher than among the general population.

KS is associated with the human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8). The conventional wisdom has been that transplant recipients develop KS from HHV-8 and KS tumour cells they already had present within their bodies. These tumour cells were able to take hold because the patient’s immune system is suppressed due to the drugs taken to prevent organ rejection.

A couple of years ago, Luppi and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that it was possible for the virus to be transmitted from donors to recipients. These new findings are even more controversial.

“What we show in the paper is that not only the virus, but the cell infected with the virus – the progenitor cell of KS – is transmitted through transplantation,” Luppi told ABC Science Online.

In a related commentary, Dr Patrick Moore of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute said that while the findings would need to be confirmed before they were widely accepted, “these results provide reasonable evidence for the controversial conclusion that tumours in some of these patients arose from cells transmitted from the organ donor.”

Luppi said the findings also provided the basis for research into cellular therapy of transplant cancers. If the progenitor cell comes from a healthy donor, then it could be possible to infuse the donor’s immune cells into the recipient to cure the cancer.

He said the research also supported the need for screening donor organs, a practice which is currently not routinely carried out by any countries.

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