Advanced cancers amongst individuals of African ancestry exhibit an almost five-fold higher prevalence of high-risk HPV types not covered by the current 9-valent vaccine

Abstract

<h3>Objectives:</h3> Among women with high-risk human papillomavirus (hrHPV) detected in cervical swabs, the distribution of hrHPV types is known to differ by racial/ethnic group, with East and West Africans and North Americans of African ancestry1 showing overrepresentation of hrHPV types that are not covered by the current 9-valent HPV vaccine. Possible downstream consequences in ethno-specific rates of aggressive hrHPV-related cancers, however, have not been systematically examined. Here, we surveyed a large, multiethnic database of aggressive cancers for non-9-valent-vaccine hrHPV types in association with individual ancestry data. <h3>Methods:</h3> Our archive of 290,311 unique advanced cancer samples underwent comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) using a hybrid-capture-based DNA sequencing platform. We detected hrHPV genomic sequences in 1,690 cervical, 1,196 anogenital, and 1,380 head and neck cancers by <i>de novo</i> assembly of nonhuman reads, followed by alignment to the RefSeq database, which distinguishes hrHPV types. Patient ancestry was determined by classifying specific SNPs by CGP based on their known variation among populations in the 1000 Genomes Project. Quantitative data were analyzed using the Fisher exact test. A two-tailed P value of <.05 was considered statistically significant; the Bonferroni correction was applied for multiple simultaneous comparisons. <h3>Results:</h3> We identified four non-vaccine hrHPV types with >10 cancer cases each: HPV35 (n=71 cases), HPV51 (n=11), HPV59 (n=42), and HPV67 (n=12). Among patients whose cancers harbored hrHPV types that are covered by the 9-valent vaccine (here, HPV16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58), 7.5% (308/4,131) were of African ancestry, lower than the overall representation of African ancestry in our database (9.1% [26,471/290,311]). In contrast, among cases with non-9-valent-vaccine hrHPV types, we identified several-fold enrichment for individuals of African ancestry (HPV35: 24% of African ancestry [17/71], HPV51: 27% [3/11], HPV59: 43% [18/42], HPV67: 25% [3/12]). In total, these four non-vaccine hrHPV types accounted for 11.4% (40/350) of all hrHPV-related advanced cancers in persons of African ancestry, but only 2.4% (95/3928) of hrHPV-related advanced cancers in individuals of other ancestries, a difference of nearly five-fold (p<0.00001, Table 1). Genomic alterations and tumor mutational burden showed no significant differences based on hrHPV type or patient ancestry, suggesting similar tumorigenic mechanisms. <h3>Conclusions:</h3> In our pan-hrHPV analysis of advanced cancers, hrHPV types not covered by the current 9-valent vaccine are strikingly increased in individuals of African ancestry. Our data strongly indicate a need to re-evaluate the choice of hrHPV types to include in the vaccine, as well as a need to re-evaluate the underlying process by which hrHPV types are chosen for inclusion.