Luciferase-Based Detection of Antibodies for the Diagnosis of HPV-Associated Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Burbelo, Peter D.; Chaturvedi, Adrija; Notkins, Abner L.; Gunti, Sreenivasulu

Using the LIPS technology, antibody-based biomarkers against the human p53 tumor antigen and antibodies against the E2, E6 and E7 oncogenes of HPV were investigated. Approximately 25% of the colon cancer and 20% of the HNSCC patients harbored statistically significant autoantibodies against wild type p53 and is consistent with other published studies [27, 28] . LIPS profiling against HPV E2, E7 and E6 viral proteins detected a high prevalence of antibody responses in HNSCC, but not in the HV, CC or SLE and is in agreement with other studies [8, 12, 29] . Consistent with published reports [12, 13, 30] , HPV16 E6 antigen was found to have a higher sensitivity than the E2 and E7 antigen. The finding that 45% of the HNSCC subjects had HPV-16 associated cancer approximates matches the known prevalence of about 25% [31] and is likely due to the stochastic nature of our small cohort. Particularly encouraging was the quite robust detection of HPV-16 antibodies by LIPS in the HNSCC subjects highlighting the potential ability of the assay to screen for these antibodies in a high-throughput fashion.