S. David Hudnall
Editor

2014

The journey of discovery of human tumor viruses has stretched over 100 years, from the discovery by Giuseppe Ciuffo of a very small transmissible agent in human warts in 1907, to the discovery of the merkel cell polyomavirus by Yuan Chang and Patrick Moore in 2008. Now that the number of known human cancer viruses has grown to seven and the number of virus associated tumors has grown to encompass tumors of lymph nodes, nasopharynx, liver, skin, cervix, smooth muscle, endothelium, and skin, it is clear that viruses play an important role in human cancer. In fact, it has been estimated that 15 % of all cases of human cancer are virus related, with over one million new cases worldwide each year.