HEALTH
Fungi grow inside cancerous tumours
WORDS NICOLETTA LANESE
Fungal DNA was found in different types of tumours
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Scientists discovered traces of fungi lurking in the tumours of people with different types of cancer, including breast, colon, pancreatic and lung cancers. However, it’s still not clear that these fungi play any role in the development or progression of cancer. Two new studies uncovered DNA from fungal cells hiding out in tumours throughout the body. In one study, researchers dusted for the genetic fingerprints of fungi in 35 different cancer types by examining more than 17,000 tissue, blood and plasma samples from cancer patients. Not every single tumour tissue sample tested positive for fungi, but overall the team did find fungi in all 35 cancer types assessed. “Some tumours had no fungi at all, and some had a huge amount of fungi,” Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, said; often when tumours contained fungi, they did so in ‘low abundances’.