Hyeyoung Lee
College of Health Sciences, South Korea
Title: Use of HPV E6/E7 and hTERT mRNA RT-qPCR assays in combination for diagnosing high grade cervical lesions
Biography
Biography: Hyeyoung Lee
Abstract
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major cause of cervical cancer, which is the third most common cancer in women. HPV E6 oncoprotein initiates degradation of cellular tumor suppressor protein p53, and induces human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) activity. Activation of hTERT then leads to progressive cervical carcinogenesis. In this study, multiplex RT-qPCR assay which detects 16 HPV high-risk subtypes (HPV 16, 18, 31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 66, 68 and 69), and the RT-qPCR assay which detects hTERT mRNA were evaluated using 545 ThinPrepⓇ Pap (Hologic Inc., Bedford, MA, USA) samples of Korea. The rates of positivity for the HPV E6/E7 mRNA RT-qPCR assay were 94.4%, 95.2%, 82.4%, 46.5%, 25.0%, and 1.1% in SCC, HSIL, ASC-H, LSIL, ASC-US and normal cytology samples, respectively. Five CIN2+ samples were not detected by the HPV E6/E7 mRNA assay; however they exhibited positive signals in the hTERT mRNA assay. Notably, the hTERT mRNA expression level was increased in high grade cervical lesions, but was very low in all 288 normal samples. These data suggest that the combination of HPV E6/E7 and hTERT mRNA expression levels could be used in a complementary manner in diagnosing high grade cervical lesions, and might be useful as a predictive marker in monitoring low grade cervical lesions