Description:

Title: Contagious Clam Cancer

Speaker: Michael Metzger, PhD / Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Host: Mojgan Naghavi, PhD

Topic:

Cancer is not normally contagious, but in soft-shell clams and other bivalve species, transmissible leukemia-like cancers are spreading from one animal to another through the environment. These transmissible cancer lineages act essentially as asexual parasites of their hosts, blurring the lines between cancer and infectious disease. We are investigating how these infectious cancers spread and how they evolve together with their hosts.