Who found XMRV in Japan

[Andrew]

We hear that Japan tested the blood supply and found XMRV. Where is this published? Who did the testing? What was the method?

 

[FernRhizome]

I've been asking this very same question! I think it must have been mentioned in one of the talks or maybe in the hearings in October?

 

[gracenote]

Here is the reference that was given in the Erlwein et al. study. I couldn't find a paper, and I'm wondering if there is no published paper. It was presented at a symposium.

2. Furuta RA, Miyazawa T, Sugiyama T, Kimura T, Hirayama F, et al. The Prevalence of Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-related Virus in Healthy Blood Donors in Japan. Cold Spring Harbor Retrovirus Symposium. 2009

 

[_Kim_]

Here is the reference that was given in the Erlwein et al. study. I couldn't find a paper, and I'm wondering if there is no published paper. It was presented at a symposium.

2. Furuta RA, Miyazawa T, Sugiyama T, Kimura T, Hirayama F, et al. The Prevalence of Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-related Virus in Healthy Blood Donors in Japan. Cold Spring Harbor Retrovirus Symposium. 2009

gracenote is correct. There is no paper, only a symposium report. I searched high and lo for more info, but came up empty handed.

 

[gracenote]

I do wonder though . . . The research is out there in some form for it to have been referenced in the Erlwein paper. And sometimes conferences publish their presentations. Maybe this report is only in Japanese.

 

[Cort]

I looked as well - couldn't find it. Didn't realize about the Symposium - thanks Kim.

 

[Andrew]

Interesting. I just found that the first UK study cites this symposium as a positive outcome.

 

[gracenote]

From this paper, I found this quote.

Lack of evidence for xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus(XMRV) in German prostate cancer patients
Oliver Hohn, Hans Krause, Pia Barbarotto, Lars Niederstadt, Nadine Beimforde , Joachim Denner , Kurt Miller , Reinhard Kurth and Norbert Bannert

Lack of XMRV in German Prostate Cancer Patients

Regarding this point, it is also of interest that Furuta et al. [33], recently reported the detection by Western blot of antibodies specific for the XMRV Gag protein in blood bank samples from prostate cancer patients and healthy donors, but no Env-specific antibodies.

 

[Countrygirl]

Kim_;48269]gracenote is correct. There is no paper, only a symposium report. I searched high and lo for more info, but came up empty handed.

Me too. Not a sausage.

 

[Hope123]

Maybe someone can volunteer and call up Cold Spring Harbor? It's a non-profit private research place that hosts meetings for academia and the gov't occasionally.

http://www.cshl.edu/index.html

Find out who sponsored the symposium. Contact the sponsor and ask for a copy of the abstract?

 

[gracenote]

Here is what I posted in another thread. It doesn't appear that anything was ever published.

Here is the reference that was given in the Erlwein et al. study. I couldn't find a paper, and I'm wondering if there is no published paper. It was presented at a symposium.

2. Furuta RA, Miyazawa T, Sugiyama T, Kimura T, Hirayama F, et al. The Prevalence of Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-related Virus in Healthy Blood Donors in Japan. Cold Spring Harbor Retrovirus Symposium. 2009

 

[ukxmrv]

This appears to be the Symposia that it was presented at

http://meetings.cshl.edu/meetings/retro09.shtml

I have emailed them to ask if there is a copy available. I also tried finding some of the researchers named in the paper and emailing them (by the last email address I could find). No luck so far.

 

[ukxmrv]

THE PREVALENCE OF XENOTROPIC MURINE LEUKEMIA VIRUS-RELATED VIRUS IN
HEALTHY BLOOD DONORS IN JAPAN

Rika A. Furuta1, Takayuki Miyazawa2, Takeki Sugiyama3, Takafumi Kimura1, Fumiya
Hirayama1, Yoshihiko Tani1 and Hirotoshi Shibata1

1 Department of Research, Japanese Red Cross Osaka Blood Center, 2 Laboratory for Viral pathogenesis, Institute for Virus Research, Kyoto University, 3 Department of Urology, Nishiwaki Municipal Hospital.

To estimate the impacts of infection with xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) on the blood service, we investigated the prevalence of this virus in both prostate
cancer patients and healthy blood donors in Japan. All specimens from the prostate cancer patients were collected after obtaining their written informed consent. The ethical committee
of the Japanese Red Cross Society approved the examination of XMRV antibodies, but not nucleic acids, in random donor sera.

All serum samples of healthy blood donors tested negative for HIV-1, HIV-2, HTLV-1, hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus and human parvovirus B19.

To make a recombinant virus as test antigens for the antibody screening, 293T cells weretransfected with an expression vector carrying an XMRV provirus clone, namely, VP62 (kindly gifted by Dr. R. H. Silverman). We used an env-defective mutant of HIV-1 derived from pNL4-3 (kindly gifted by Dr. A. Adachi) as a negative control.

Two days after transfection, the culture supernatants of the transfected cells were collected and concentrated 20 times bycentrifugation. We implemented western blotting assay to screen antibodies against XMRV in sera because a high background was observed if we performed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. In the western blotting, the blot strips were incubated with the serum samples diluted 1:100 with 5 % skim milk in Tris-buffered saline overnight at 4C.

Two of 32 serum samples collected from the prostate cancer patients and 5 of 300 serum samples collected from healthy blood donors tested positive for antibodies against XMRV Gag protein. We did not observe any specific signals against Env proteins in the western blotting. Of the 2 serum samples that were obtained from prostate cancer patient and tested positive for anti-XMRV antibodies, the XMRV specific nucleic acid sequence was detected in only one sample (patient #24) by using nested RT-PCR.

In addition, we collected 7 mL of whole blood cells from the patient #24 and cultured the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in the presence of recombinant interleukin 2 and concanavalin A.

The PBMCs were harvested after 10 days of culture, the virus was isolated from the cells by performing a LacZ marker rescue assay and RNA and genomic DNA were extracted. The nested PCR performed to detect XMRV yielded positive results for both genomic and RT PCR, although the virus was successfully isolated in only 1 of 3 independent experiments. To examine the susceptibility of PBMCs derived from healthy individuals to XMRV, we inoculated activated PBMCs from 3 healthy volunteers with the culture supernatant of the PBMCs obtained from patient #24. By using the nested PCR, we detected the XMRV-specific nucleic acid sequence in the genomic DNA of the PBMCs obtained from 2 of the 3 healthy volunteers.

We conclude that XMRV infection is prevalent among both prostate cancer patients and healthy individuals in Japan. Although our study had a limited sample size, the prevalence among blood donors as determined by identifying XMRV-specific antibodies was found to be 1.7%, while that among prostate cancer patients was found to be 6.3% (P<0.05, one-sided Mann-Whitney U-test).

The results of genomic PCR performing on the PBMCs indicate that XMRV is sustained in a few fractions of blood cells and can spread through blood even though the virus replication rate appears to be very low.

 

[Esther12]

Good work getting the info. Thanks.

 

[gracenote]

Thanks so much ukxmrv. I'm very appreciative and impressed.

Now the brains on our board need to explain it all to me.

 

[Hope123]

Great work, ukxmrv! Thanks for the abstract.

 

[Bob]

"We conclude that XMRV infection is prevalent among both prostate cancer patients and healthy individuals in Japan. Although our study had a limited sample size, the prevalence among blood donors as determined by identifying XMRV-specific antibodies was found to be 1.7%, while that among prostate cancer patients was found to be 6.3%"

This research is very significant, and very interesting... I wonder why more hasn't been made of it... maybe just because it hasn't been published yet.

To summarize the study:
The research team in Japan tested for XMVR in both prostate cancer patients and blood donor samples, using XMRV-specific antibodies tests.
Their conclusion is that 6.3% of prostate cancer patients in the study had XMRV, and 1.7% of blood donors had XMRV.

So this suggests that XMRV is present in the general population in Japan at about 2% (1.7%) using a small sample of blood donors...
so now we have confirmation of XMRV being present in the general population in the USA and Japan...

but not, allegedly, in the UK... obviously XMRV is unable to obtain a UK visa!

 

[Esther12]

I wonder why it hasn't been published.

 

[Carla-nl]

It would certainly help if there was a link to the publication. Since UKxmrv was able to retrieve the contents, would you also be able to inform if there's a link?
I'd like to publish this on the site and add it to the newslinks we send out to press.

Thanks,
Carla

 

[ukxmrv]

Hi Carla,

There is no link. Took a lot of digging to find this one. It was sent to me by another PWME in the UK who got it from Cold Spring Harbour.

(I just checked and it was a PDF in an email to her)