Cutavirus association with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma and its precursor 

• Speaker: Docent Maria Söderlund-Venermo
• Venue: Faculty Club, Biomedicum Helsinki 1
• Time: Thursday 4.6 at 3 PM
• Host: Vesa Olkkonenl

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Söderlund-Venermo, PhD, adjunct professor in virology, is a group leader at the Department of Virology, University of Helsinki. She is past-president (2024-26) of the World Society for Virology (WSV), chair of the Parvoviridae Expert Group of the 2022-24 WHO Pandemic Preparedness project, and member of the ICTV Parvoviridae Study Group since 2012. Her research interests include clinical and molecular virology, with the main current focus on human bocaviruses, protoparvoviruses, and other emerging human DNA viruses; their diagnostics, epidemiology, tropism, pathobiology and disease associations

ABSTRACT 

Cutavirus (CuV), a novel human protoparvovirus, was discovered by metagenomics in 2016 in diarrheic stools and 4 skins of patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL, subtype MF). Soon after, we and others significantly associated CuV-DNA skin persistence with CTCL, while healthy individuals were negative. CTCL is a heterogeneous group of skin lymphomas with an unknown cause. Some patients present with a long-standing reactive inflammatory condition called parapsoriasis en plaques (PP) before developing CTCL. We detected CuV DNA in up to 67% of skin biopsies of such PP patients. It has long been suggested that chronic antigen stimulation by a pathogen may play a role in CTCL carcinogenesis. Therefore, we aimed to determine the prevalence, activity, and cell tropism of CuV in patients with CTCL-MF/PP and other cancerous, inflammatory and other disease conditions by qPCR, RT-PCR, ISH-IHC, NGS and EIA of skin, breast, intestine, stool, blood or serum samples, from over 500 patients from six countries. We show CuV to persist in multiple skin and PBMC specimens of CTCL and PP patients for up to 15 years, indicating viral spread in the body despite CuV-specific IgG. We detected CuV DNA in both dermis and epidermis, mostly in Th cells and some keratinocytes, and showed it to express spliced mRNA and to be excreted into stools within protective capsids, indicating viral spread to the environment. 

CuV may either enhance the progression of PP into CTCL, perhaps defining a specific subtype of CTCL-MF, or it may be oncolytic, similar to a related H1 rodent protoparvovirus. Our ultimate goal is to elucidate the possible role of CuV in the pathogenesis of CTCL-MF and PP.