VIRUS TIED TO FORM OF BLOOD CANCER.

Byline: Anne Burke Daily News Staff Writer

Doctors in Los Angeles said Thursday they have discovered that an AIDS-associated virus could cause multiple myeloma, a fatal form of blood cancer.

Doctors at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center and UCLA said they believe the virus, called Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpes virus, or KSHV, might trigger malignant tumors in bone marrow by infecting nonmalignant cells.

``We now have a new target for developing treatments and possibly a vaccine to prevent myeloma,'' Dr. James R. Berenson said during a news conference.

Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer, behind lymphoma. About 15,000 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and the disease kills about 10,000 Americans annually.

The doctors' findings also may have implications for the estimated 1 million people in the United States who have been diagnosed with an apparent precursor to multiple myeloma, called monoclonal gammopathy, of undetermined significance.

Doctors noted it could be many years before a vaccine for multiple myeloma is available.

The traditional treatment is chemotherapy, but patients, on the average, do not live more than three years after diagnosis. The risk of developing the disease is twice as great among African-Americans as in whites.

The physicians detected KSHV in certain bone marrow cells of 15 multiple myeloma patients.

What was especially remarkable was that they found the virus not in the malignant cells, but in the nonmalignant cells, a soil-like environment where proteins that promote runaway growth of the myeloma tumor are produced.

Kaposi's sarcoma is a skin cancer infecting many people with the human immunodeficiency virus.