Cancer of the cervix is diagnosed in more than 15,000 American women each year, and it kills almost 5,000 of them. Most of those cancers are thought to result from infection by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus. For this virus, cancer is a reproductive method: it reproduces its own genes by inserting them into the dna of cervical cells and causing those cells to divide uncontrollably. But now pathologist Tzyy- Choou Wu and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins may have found a way to fight the deadly disease. They have developed a vaccine that in mice both destroys cancerous cells and prevents new tumors from forming.
Hiding inside cervical cells, the papillomavirus normally escapes a full-fledged immune response. Wu’s vaccine is designed to smoke it out. The vaccine consists of a key viral protein--the one that triggers cervical cells to grow out of control--attached to another protein called lamp-1 and ...
