Sero prevalence study of Human Papplilomavirus HPV infection in women an evaluation of GST linked antigen based ELISA

Abstract

The high-risk Human Papillomavirus (HR-HPV) associated cancer of the uterine-cervix, is the third commonest cancer in women. The absence of a stringent disease management policy has skewed the demography of the disease incidence to the economically poor nations. Currently ~80% of the disease is estimated to occur in the developing nations and the highest rate of incidence has been recorded in India. The effective disease management in the developed West is based on mandatory screening of women periodically for abnormal cervical cytology through Pap smears. But the effective and#8215;screen, follow-up and treat strategy has failed to find replication in the less developed nations due to resource crunch of infrastructure and skill. Socio-cultural prejudices associated with the invasive Pap smear sampling methodology have further prevented its popular acceptance more so in the rural settings. Although latent infections do not always result in profound antibody response several reports suggest significant HPV antigen specific immune response on infection; especially to the major capsid protein L1. Hence, for disease management in the resource limited settings an effective ELISA for the determination of sero-prevalence to HPV antigens holds promise as an essential diagnostic and/or screening tool. The VLP based ELISA has been employed for the detection of the HPV L1 specific antibody response in a few sero-epidemiology studies and extensively for the determination of vaccine efficacy. However production of VLPs is a laborious process and therefore limiting its utility in large-scale, broad-based (=evaluation of infection with larger number of HR-HPV genotypes other than the common HPV16 and 18) sero-epidemiological studies. newline