
300px|thumb|upright=1.6|Percentage of people infected with hepatitis C in 2015. The [[hepatitis C virus is the cause of hepatitis C and some cancers such as liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma, abbreviated HCC) and lymphomas in humans.]]
300px|thumb|upright=1.6|Percentage of people infected with hepatitis C in 2015. The [[hepatitis C virus is the cause of hepatitis C and some cancers such as liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma, abbreviated HCC) and lymphomas in humans.]]
An oncovirus or oncogenic virus is a virus that can cause cancer. This term originated from studies of acutely transforming retroviruses in the 1950–60s, when the term oncornaviruses was used to denote their RNA virus origin. With the letters RNA removed, it now refers to any virus with a DNA or RNA genome causing cancer and is synonymous with tumor virus or cancer virus. The vast majority of human and animal viruses do not cause cancer, probably because of longstanding co-evolution between the virus and its host. Oncoviruses have been important not only in epidemiology, but also in investigations of cell cycle control mechanisms such as the retinoblastoma protein.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).