在感染人类的​​数千种病毒中，只有七种会导致普通人群癌症。肿瘤测序现在是一种常见的癌症医学程序，因此如果存在的话，很可能已经发现了更多的人类癌症病毒。在这里，我们回顾了可以为新癌症病毒专门搜索提供信息的癌症特征，重点关注卡波西肉瘤疱疹病毒和默克尔细胞多瘤病毒作为基因组和转录组搜索成功的最新例子。我们强调流行病学在确定检查哪些癌症和描述病毒发现方法方面的重要性。病毒发现的障碍，例如新的基因组和病毒对信使 RNA 表达的抑制，可能会阻碍使用现有方法发现病毒。最佳的病毒狩猎应以这样的方式进行：如果没有发现病毒，则可以合理地排除肿瘤具有传染性病因，并且可以找到有关肿瘤生物学的新信息。

Of the thousands of viruses infecting humans, only seven cause cancer in the general population. Tumor sequencing is now a common cancer medicine procedure, and so it seems likely that more human cancer viruses already would have been found if they exist. Here, we review cancer characteristics that can inform a dedicated search for new cancer viruses, focusing on Kaposi sarcoma herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus as the most recent examples of successful genomic and transcriptomic searches. We emphasize the importance of epidemiology in determining which cancers to examine and describe approaches to virus discovery. Barriers to virus discovery, such as novel genomes and viral suppression of messenger RNA expression, may exist that prevent virus discovery using existing approaches. Optimally virus hunting should be performed in such a way that if no virus is found, the tumor can be reasonably excluded from having an infectious etiology and new information about the biology of the tumor can be found.