Cervical carcinoma is is a major cause of morbidity and motality among women in the US and worldwide. The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is associated with the development of cervical cancer. HPV structural proteins are highly immunogenic but fail to induce crossreactive and protective immune responses against heterologous strains of HPV. Development of an immunogen capable of reproducing HPV type variability may be essential for the induction of an effective immune response against HPV infection by divergent strains of the virus. Numerouse studies have demonstrated that a humoral immune response against HPV is likely a necessary component of an effective vaccine. A fundamental issue that remains unresolved is how to induce an effective immune response to a pathogen containing important target proteins that are highly variable at the antigenic epitope level. To this end, we wish to apply and characterize a novel vaccine approach developed at Dr. Torres' laboratory that accounts for the high variability of viral proteins. This novel approach that uses computer aided epitope variation analysis and peptide synthesis to produce a mixture of all the known amino acid sequences of a neutralization epitope. We will attempt to develop a vaccine formulation that effectively represents the antigenic diversity in HPV variants that are associated with cervical cancer.
