The most common cancer-causing strain of human papillomavirus, HPV16, can reprogram immune cells surrounding the tumor to help cancer grow, and new work in mice blocking this process helped treatments prevent the spread of cancer.

HPV is common in humans and in most cases clears naturally but HPV16 is linked to over half of cervical cancer cases and roughly 90% of HPV throat cancers. The HPV vaccine can prevent those cancers if vaccination occurs prior to HPV exposure but young people are the first generation to have the vaccine readily available.

That means a whole lot of people, 70% of the world, were exposed to HPV before the vaccines existed, so work is underway to create a therapeutic vaccines that can be taken following an abnormal pap smear or cancer diagnosis. The current efforts trigger an immune response against infected cells by T-cells but have had limited effectiveness.

Cancer cells reprogramming healthier ones faster than T-cells can trigger a defense may be why.



The new work looked at signaling protein Interleukin-23. IL-23 has long been implicated in cervical and throat cancers so using mice and cell cultures, found that two HPV proteins, E6 and E7, prompt nearby cells to release IL-23, which in turns prevents the body’s T-cells from attacking the tumor.

 IL-23 is weaponized to stop T-cells from working effectively. Blocking IL-23 using antibodies that inhibit IL-23 are already FDA-approved for treating psoriasis and other conditions and in mice they made the therapeutic vaccine more effective because it let T-cells do their job: find and kill cancer. 

It's only in mice, and therefore EXPLORATORY no matter how SEO content farms and corporate media try to phrase it. Mice are not little people so just as you should not believe a chemical causes human cancer because someone claims it in mice or other animals, no product can ever be FDA approved based on animal models.

Yet if this turns out to be valid enough that a company wants to put it into human clinical trials, the process should be easier because the technology would be off-label rather than brand new.

Citation: Kast WM, Prins R, Fernandez D, Akbari O. HPV16 E6 and E7 expressing cancer cells suppress the anti-tumor immune response by upregulating KLF2 mediated IL-23 expression in macrophages. J ImmunoTherapy Can. 2025. https://jitc.bmj.com/content/13/8/e011915