Recent Advances in Cervical Cancer Vaccine Development

Ahn, Woong Shick

Abstract

Human papillomavirus infection is often transient and spontaneously reversible. High-risk human papillomavirus persistence is the major cause of cancerous transformation in several tissues. For prophylactic vaccines there is first clinical evidence of effectivity (ie, 100% protection from HPV infection and dysplasia by virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies). Also, Therapeutic vaccines have entered clinical evaluation. While prophylactic VLP vaccines are immunogenic per se, therapeutic vaccines will need further adjuvants to guide T cell differentiation, expansion, survival, and homing to tumor sites. To enhance clinical outcome of successful T cell induction in patients, the susceptibility of the tumor cells for lysis must be addressed in the future, since tumor immune evasion is a severe problem in cervical cancer. Both preventive and therapeutic human papillomavirus vaccinations will probably change our approach to the screening and therapy of human papillomavirus-related diseases in the next few years. The mass vaccination of adolescent patients should lower the frequency of these very frequently lethal infections.