Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2025
Abstract
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is associated with cancers, including lymphomas and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). To date, risk variants for NPC were mainly identified from Chinese populations, which dominated the world's total number of cases. Although Southeast Asia (SEA) countries have among the world's top yet intriguingly diverse NPC age-standardized incidence rates across subpopulations, data on EBV from SEA remains scarce. In this study, we examined 83 NPC patients of different ancestries for the presence of risk haplotypes associated with the Southern Chinese NPC and generated and analyzed 67 EBV sequences (from tissue, patient-derived xenografts and lymphoblastoid cell lines of 60 NPC patients) together with 838 published EBV genomes. Our study revealed that NPC patients of non-Chinese ancestry had fewer risk variants and haplotypes that are associated with Southern Chinese NPC and clustered distinctly from lymphomas, Southern Chinese NPC, and non-cancer controls. The distribution of non-synonymous variants was similar among NPC patients of Chinese ancestry, irrespective of geographical location. Meanwhile, non-synonymous variants in genes related to packaging, latency, and structural proteins such as BPLF1, LF3, and LMP1 varied across different ancestries. Our findings suggest possibilities of EBV adaptation to host genetics for NPC pathogenesis and warrant further research for the understudied NPC subpopulations.
Recommended Citation
Tee, Hwee Sze; Liang, Jingtong; Aziz, Norazlin Abdul; Zhou, Xiang; Hisham, Hamidah Akmal; Tan, Ke-En; Chen, Yanhong; Burhanuddin, Zuriani; Kwan, Johnny S.H.; Lo, Kwok-Wai; Hassan, Faridah; bt Mohd Mokhtar, Sha'ariyah; Khoo, Alan Soo Beng; Xu, Miao; Lim, Yat-Yuen; and Tan, Lu Ping, "Epstein-Barr Virus Sequence Variations Among the Understudied Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients of Diverse Ancestries in Southeast Asia" (2025). Department of Medical Oncology Faculty Papers. Paper 287.
https://jdc.jefferson.edu/medoncfp/287
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
PubMed ID
40042148
Language
English
Comments
This article is the author's final published version in the Journal of Medical Virology, Volume 97, Issue 3, March 2025, Article number e70269.
The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.70269. Copyright © 2025 Ministry of health, Malaysia. Journal of Medical Virology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.