Current Cancer Therapy Reviews - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2010

The discovery of human papillomavirus (HPV) as a necessary etiological factor for cervical cancer has spurred the development of preventive and therapeutic HPV vaccines for the control of HPV-associated malignancies including cervical, vulvar, vaginal, and a subset of head and neck cancers. The commercial preventive HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, use HPV virus-like particles to generate neutralizing antibodies against Read More

Cervical screening based on testing for the DNA of high-risk HPV types as primary screening test detects the precursors of cervical cancers earlier than cytology. This allows longer screening intervals and results in increased effectiveness in preventing invasive cervical cancers. Data suggest that protection is similar irrespective whether sole HPV testing or HPV in conjunction with cytology are applied as primary tests. In additi Read More

This article reviews the natural history of HPV infection covering key aspects of cell biology, virology and immunology. The oncogenic HPV lifecycle is characterised by infection in basal cells of anogenital epithelia with virus production dependent on epithelial differentiation and virions produced only in terminally differentiated cells. Natural control of an oncogenic type HPV infection depends on appropriate activation of innate im Read More

About 35 years ago human papillomaviruses (HPV) have been suggested as causative agent for cervical cancer whose infectious etiology had been suggested already many years before. The discovery of the plurality of HPVs encompassing a variety of types with particular biologic properties, the regular presence of the genomes of the so called high-risk types within tumor biopsies, the awareness about the transforming poten Read More

Prophyllactic HPV vaccines are efficacious in preventing persistent infections by vaccine-HPV types and related cervical disease. The maximum effect is achieved in women who are not exposed to HPV vaccine types at the time of vaccination (HPV DNA negative women). Today's published data demonstrate equal clinical vaccine efficacy in women between 15 and 26 years and women between 24 and 45 years. The public h Read More

New vaccine technology has led to vaccines containing highly purified antigens with improved safety profiles, but increased antigen purity often results in weakened immunogenicity. A better understanding of innate and adaptive immunity and their interaction at the molecular level has led to the use of innovative adjuvants combined with careful antigen selection. Adjuvants can be used to amplify the immune response, and th Read More

Persistent human Papillomavirus (HPV) infections are now recognised as the leading cause of cervical cancer (CC). Approximately 100 types of human infecting HPV exist in nature and according to the samples collected from either pre-cancerous or cancerous lesions, almost ten are responsible for a good part of the CC cases. Two anti-HPV vaccines are currently registered worldwide - a tetravalent and a bivalent one Read More

Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of death by cancer in the western world. Present oncological treatments have relatively little impact on long term survival and hope is pinned on screening. Current population-based screening methods are insufficient in reducing colorectal cancer deaths, therefore new approaches are needed. One approach is chemoprevention, which targets specific signalling pathways to interfere in the Read More

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short (∼22 nucleotides), highly conserved non-coding RNA molecules that bind to sequences in the 3' untranslated region (3' UTR) of genes with full or partial complementarity, leading to their degradation and/or translational inhibition. Dysregulation of miRNA expression is associated with several human cancers and accumulation of these molecules differs significantly between normal and neo Read More

The use of cancer vaccines to induce anti-tumor immune responses holds huge potential to complement traditional cancer therapies. Cancer vaccines are designed to re-calibrate the existing host-tumour interaction, tipping the balance from tumor acceptance towards tumor control to the benefit of the cancer patient. Additionally, the highly specific character of the host immune response minimizes the risk for unattractive Read More