#hpv16 — Public Fediverse posts

OUT NOW in Nature Communications: #HPV16 causes the majority of the 1,800 cervical cancers diagnosed every single day, but most infections are controlled by the immune system.

Our study shows that these disparate outcomes are shaped by genetic variation in both host and virus.

Most HPV16 research treats the virus as genetically static. It is not. HPV16 isolates differ by up to ~2% of its ~7900 bp genome, and can differ in cervical cancer risk by >100-fold.

We analyzed 4704 carefully-curated HPV16 genomes to study this variability.

We discovered 56 codons in the HPV16 genome at which amino acid variation exceeds that expected by chance (dN>dS). This is evidence of selection for functional changes that benefit the virus.

These positions — being variable — are important targets to avoid in immunotherapies.

We then examined short segments of HPV16 proteins that are recognized by the immune system, called epitopes. We found that epitopes recognized by cytotoxic T cells through the human immune allele HLA-B*07:02 contained disproportionately many positively selected codons.

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HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2025.30.27.2400820

#HackerNews #HPVvaccination #HPV16 #HPV18 #Denmark #publichealth #vaccinationresearch

Only ~12 of 450 HPV types are carcinogenic. The riskiest is #HPV16.

Confusingly, there is a poor correlation between relatedness and cancer: HPV16's close relatives, HPV31 and HPV35, are much less carcinogenic.

The genetic basis of these differences is not well understood. 3/8