Judging the carcinogenicity of rare human papillomavirus types

摘要

Persistent infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) types is accepted as the necessary cause of invasive cervical cancer (ICC).1 However, for the development of HPV screening tests and vaccines, a large number of mucoso-tropic HPV types need to be judged separately. Although some types are powerful carcinogens and can be found in a sizeable proportion of ICC,2 the classification of rarer types is more challenging: not only is their prevalence in ICC very low, but as all HPV types share a common mode of sexual transmission, confounding from the concurrent presence of other carcinogenic HPV types is difficult to rule out.