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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.