A new study conducted by German researchers appears to challenge the findings of at least two previous studies conducted in the US, as it found no link between prostate cancer and a virus that had been previously reported as found in some tumors.

Researchers from the University of Utah had reported some months ago that they had found evidence of a virus known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV in as many as 40% of the prostate cancers they studied, and that it was especially prevalent in the more aggressive kinds.

Antibodies of the same virus had also been reportedly found in about 95% of patients suffering from the far more mysterious ailment chronic fatigue syndrome. These findings led many in the scientific and medical communities to form the opinion that the XMRV virus may be responsible for the beginnings of several disease for which there is currently little known about their etiology.

The German research was conducted by studying tissue samples from the prostate cancer tumors of 589 German patients, collected between 2000 and 2006. The team, lead by Dr. Reinhard Kurth and Dr. Norbert Bannert of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin reported in their  final article that they found no traces of the XMRV virus in their study samples, seemingly a contradiction of the Utah findings.

Dr Bannert does not refute however the findings of his American counterparts and says that he sees the difference in the results of the two studies as a reason for further investigative work. “A possible geographic restriction of XMRV and its association with prostate cancer should be studied closely”

So what do the authors of that earlier study make of the new German research? Dr Robert Silverman, who was a member of the team and is from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, notes that the techniques used by his team differed from those implemented by the German researchers and that may be a factor in their failure to detect the virus. Alternately he says that Dr Bannert may be correct, and that there is a geographic factor in play. He hypothesizes that the perhaps the European strain of the XMRV has a different RNA sequence of that found amongst people in the States, or that simply the virus is more prevalent in the USA than it is in Germany.

Both teams of researchers agree upon one crucial point though; there is still much more work to be done before any definitive conclusions can be drawn about the role XMRV plays in prostate cancer development.