Professor Galloway explains that there are many HPVs that infect the genital tract and a set of those cause benign genital warts but another set is able to cause lesions that will go on and progress to cervical or other anal-genital cancers.

Denise Galloway, Ph.D., talks about HPV and its link to cervical cancer and how HPV infection affects normal cellular processes. “There are many HPVs that infect the genital tract and a set of those cause benign genital warts but another set is able to cause lesions that will go on and progress to cervical or other anal-genital cancers. I think the link is very firmly established. There are, have been many large international studies that have looked for the presence of HPV in cervical cancers and found that nearly 100% of them are positive for the viral DNA. I think the mechanisms are pretty well understood. When HPV infects the genital epithelium, it causes those cells to proliferate when they normally would not. It also causes the normal checkpoints that would prevent the cell from replicating if there is DNA damage or damage to the chromosomes, it inactivates those checkpoints so that the cells that receive damage can still continue to replicate.”

cervical cancers, viral dna, genital warts, dna damage, genital tract, cellular processes, cervical cancer, epithelium, checkpoints, chromosomes, lesions, galloway, hpv, mechanisms, cancer