University of Colorado Cancer Center member Rosemary Rochford, PhD, has spent the past 34 years researching the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) a virus that causes several types of cancer, including Burkitt lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, gastric carcinoma, Hodgkin’s disease, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In February, Rochford was announced as the winner of the 2024 Henle Award from the Board of the International Association for Research on Epstein-Barr Virus and Associated Diseases. The award recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to the understanding and/or treatment of EBV and associated diseases.
“I’m quite honored to receive it,” says Rochford, professor emerita in the CU School of Medicine. “It’s an award for which you get nominated by your peers, and there have only been 17 awardees since it started in 1990.”
The malaria connection
Rochford has focused her decades of EBV research on the link between the virus and Burkitt lymphoma, an aggressive B-cell lymphoma. She has conducted much of her research on patients in sub-Saharan Africa, where she has found that malaria plays a role in the EBV-related cancer that primarily affects children.
“It’s not just that they get EBV-infected, but they also get hit with malaria,” says Rochford, who will deliver a prize lecture at the International Symposium on EBV & KSHV & Related Agents and Diseases’ Joint Meeting in Boston this summer. “There’s an enzyme called activation-induced deaminase, or AID, in B cells, which helps B cells make antibodies and is part of our natural immune response. However, AID is also shown to cause a characteristic oncogene translocation found in Burkitt lymphoma. We have shown that malaria can increase AID to an unhealthy level, which works with EBV to make B cells more susceptible to that oncogene translocation.”
Rochford has made many trips to sub-Saharan Africa to conduct research, and she has discovered that repeated infection with malaria is the cause of high levels of Burkitt’s lymphoma in that part of the world.
“A lot of times when we study a disease, we think of a single episode — what happens when you get SARS CoV-2 and then COVID, for instance,” she says. “But when these kids get malaria, it’s repeated over their lifetime. They eventually develop immunity to disease, but never to infection. We were trying to understand how that dynamic affects these children’s susceptibility to EBV, and what we discovered is that breast-feeding mothers with malaria shed EBV in their breast milk and transmit the virus to young infants. The infants get repeated malaria infections and end up with more EBV-infected cells, increasing their risk for getting Burkitt lymphoma.”
A vaccine for EBV to prevent Burkitt lymphoma is unlikely, Rochford says, but her research points to another way of stopping EBV-related Burkitt lymphoma, at least in Africa: slowing the spread of malaria.
“Our research tells us that malaria promotes cancer, and that’s a very different thing to think about,” she says. “As malaria incidence and burden of malaria has gone down, the incidence of Burkitt lymphoma has also gone down. There’s a nice correlation to that in some of our studies, which tells me that what we’re finding in the lab matches what we're seeing in the real world. The target should really be to control malaria to prevent cancer.”
Cultivating relationships
Developing relationships with clinicians and communities in Africa has been an especially rewarding part of her research for which Rochford is pleased to be recognized with the Henle Award.
“I’m not discovering a gene or protein or that sort of hardcore molecular science, but it’s meaningful to be recognized for the work that my team and I have done,” she says. “I’ve trained PhD students there; students from Africa have come to the U.S. to work in my lab. It’s been a labor of love and passion, and it’s a really lovely way to see two worlds come together. Scientists are all geeky, nerdy people, whether you’re Kenyan or American.”
Studying EBV-related cancers for as long as she has, especially in a part of the world with limited access to medical care, has shifted Rochford’s research focus from ways to treat cancer to ways of preventing it.
“The thing I’ve learned from studying Burkitt lymphoma is that every cancer is different,” she says. “Trying to understand how people get a cancer helps you think about prevention. A lot of people are trying to cure cancer, and that’s a critically important area, but if we could prevent cancer, that would be the ultimate goal.”
Featured image: Rochford and her former post-doctoral fellow Sidney Ogolla at their research clinic lab at the Chulaimbo county hospital in Western Kenya.
