From Peyton Rous to the HPV Vaccine: A Journey of Discovery and Progress.

Abstract

* Abbreviations: HPV — : human papillomavirus 9vHPV — : 9-valent human papillomavirus vaccine Peyton Rous began his famous experiments in 1909 at the Rockefeller Institute, demonstrating that a sarcoma on the chest of a Plymouth Rock hen that had been brought to him by a farmer from Long Island, New York, could be transplanted to other chickens. Because cell-free tumor extracts resulted in transmission of the sarcoma to other hens, he postulated the agent must be a small transmissible agent, possibly a virus.1 The concept that a virus might cause cancer was outside the prevailing concepts of the time, and his postulate languished for years. In 1964, Epstein et al2 described the first identified human DNA tumor virus in cell lines obtained from African children suffering from Burkitt lymphoma, demonstrating the human oncogenic potential of this virus (later named the Epstein-Barr virus). By 1981, hepatitis B virus had been linked to hepatocellular carcinoma, and a plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine was licensed as the first anticancer vaccine.3 In 1983, papillomavirus DNA was isolated from human cervical cancer tissue, and today, human papillomavirus (HPV) is recognized to cause essentially all cervical cancers.4 The US Food and Drug Administration licensed the first HPV vaccine in 2006. Wherever vaccination campaigns against these 2 vaccine-preventable … Address correspondence to H. Cody Meissner, MD, Tufts University School of Medicine, 800 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111. E-mail: cmeissner{at}tuftsmedicalcenter.org