News Releases & Research Results Discovery of the transmission of maternal cervical cancer to a newborn

The results of the collaborative research project conducted mainly by President Ayumu Arakawa and Director Chitose Ogawa of the Department of Pediatric Oncology, National Cancer Center Hospital, and Chief Takashi Kohno of the Division of Genome Biology, National Cancer Center Research Institute/Division of Translational Genomics, Exploratory Oncology Research and Clinical Trial Center, and by the Jikei University School of Medicine, St. Luke's International Hospital, National Center for Child Health and Development, Toho University, and Hokkaido University Hospital.

• Lung cancers in two pediatric cancer patients were demonstrated to have been caused by the transmission of maternal cervical cancer.
• In the clinical research, “TOP-GEAR project”, at the National Cancer Center Hospital, lung cancers were genetically analyzed in pediatric cancer patients. Gene sequences not belonging to the patients were detected, suggesting the transmission of maternal cervical cancer to the lungs of the children during delivery.

This project was conducted with the support of the Program for an Integrated Database of Clinical and Genomic Information by AMED.

The results were published in the international academic journal The New England Journal of Medicine on January 7.

Arakawa A., et al. Vaginal Transmission of Cancer from Mothers with Cervical Cancer to Infants The New England Journal of Medicine
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2030391