HPV vaccines to prevent cervical cancer and other HPV-associated diseases

Published on September 27, 2018   45 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

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0:00
Hello. My name is John Schiller. I head the Center of Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. The title of my talk today is HPV Vaccines to Prevent Cervical Cancer and Other HPV-associated Diseases. It's a pleasure to be able to talk to you today about Prophylactic vaccines. These vaccines have been widely touted as one of the most significant advances in cancer prevention over the last two decades. I hope to demonstrate in this lecture that these vaccines are fortunate convergence of advances in basic molecular biology, cancer etiology, and vaccinology. Over much work remains before the full potential of these vaccines can be realized.
0:44
The outline of my talk is as follows. We'll first of all start to talk a little bit about the basics of HPV and its association with cancer and then we'll move on to talk about the composition of the vaccines and their efficacy and effectiveness in the actual immunization trials. Then we'll talk about some of the implementation issues that remained to be resolved. Finally, we'll get into more mechanistic studies where we tried to figure out why they work so unexpectedly well.
1:13
So, HPVs are double-stranded circular DNA genome viruses. Depicted here is the genome, the two genes we're most concerned about are E6 and E7 which are preferentially weakened and expressed in cancers, and today, most of my talk will be about the virion proteins, the major capsid protein which is L1 and the minor capsid protein which is called L2.
1:40
The virions are non-enveloped icosahedral shells which are formed of 72 pentamers of these star-shaped L1s. Overall size is 16 nanometers in diameter. The second capsid protein, the L2, is present at up to 72 copies, they are shown here in red from an inside view and encapsulated within this capsid which is 8kb circular double-stranded genome which is chromatinized.
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HPV vaccines to prevent cervical cancer and other HPV-associated diseases

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